John Dillaway, Ascend Laboratories

John Dillaway’s long and distinguished career goes back to the early days of generic drugs and gives him a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing the industry today.

By building a solid infrastructure and an outstanding team, he has helped develop Ascend Laboratories into a major player in the generic drug space since its creation in 2000.

As executive vice president of Ascend, Dillaway has direct oversight for all sales and marketing efforts. These include overseeing the sales team which consists of five account executives, sales and customer support teams, as well as pricing, trade events and journal advertising.

 He also interacts regularly with other Ascend support areas including with finance for budgets, IT for programming support, supply chain for inventory control and regulatory for any and all product-related issues.

Dillaway began his career at Moore Medical Corp. in 1977. At that time Moore was the fourth largest drug wholesaler with four DCs nationally and was the largest private label distributor of generic drugs. He advanced to the position of senior vice president responsible for Moore’s entire drug distribution operation. In 1997 Moore was acquired by McKesson and Dillaway left and started Medical Specialty, a sales and marketing consulting group to manufacturers and dispensers. In 2008 Medical Specialty was acquired by The PharmaNetwork with the resulting company emerging as Ascend Labs. Since then Ascend has grown into a top-10 generic manufacturer with a significant presence in today’s market.