PPD Brand Guidelines: A 1985 One-Person Firm, Wilmington & Thermo Fisher

A consultancy that moved to the coast.

PPD stands for Pharmaceutical Product Development. English Wikipedia says the company was founded by Fred Eshelman, a pharmacist by training, as a one-person consulting firm in 1985. WilmingtonBiz Magazine, in a fall 2020 report on the region’s drug-research cluster, describes the same start: a one-person firm in Maryland in 1985 that put down roots in the Port City the next year.

That move came in 1986, when Eshelman relocated the business to Wilmington, North Carolina, and widened it from consulting into development services. Both Wikipedia and WilmingtonBiz Magazine date the company’s incorporation in North Carolina to 1989. The magazine says it was the quality of life on the coast that brought the firm to Wilmington.

The business PPD built is what the industry calls a contract research organisation, or CRO: a company that drug and biotech makers hire to run parts of the research needed to bring a medicine to regulators. In practice that means planning studies, finding hospitals and clinics to take part, monitoring the trial sites, handling the data and testing samples in laboratories. WilmingtonBiz Magazine notes that PPD, having started as a consulting firm, came to work for a range of customers, from pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms to government and academic institutions.

Growth abroad followed in the 1990s. A timeline the magazine printed, credited to PPD, lists an expansion into Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 1995 and into Asia-Pacific in 1997, with a location in Australia. In between, in 1996, PPD made its first initial public offering, listing on the Nasdaq market under the symbol PPDI, Wikipedia says.

Two listings, two private-equity owners and a tower.

The 2000s gave PPD a landmark at home. The PPD timeline in WilmingtonBiz Magazine records the opening of a 12-storey global headquarters in Wilmington in 2007, and an expansion into Russia and Ukraine in 2008 through the purchase of a Russia-based research company. In 2010 PPD spun off its compound-partnering division as a separate listed company, Furiex Pharmaceuticals, Wikipedia says; that same year the company marked 25 years since its founding.

A year later the ownership changed. In December 2011 PPD was acquired by affiliates of The Carlyle Group and Hellman & Friedman, which took it private, according to both Wikipedia and WilmingtonBiz Magazine. Wikipedia says that in April 2017 the two firms agreed a recapitalisation that brought in two further investors: a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and an affiliate of Singapore’s GIC.

Under private ownership PPD added services through deals. Wikipedia lists the purchase of Acurian, a patient-enrolment business, in August 2013; a joint venture with SNBL announced in December 2014 to offer clinical development services in Japan; and the acquisition of Evidera, a real-world evidence and health-outcomes firm, in September 2016. In 2019, Wikipedia adds, Evidera bought Medimix and PPD’s site business acquired a network of research sites from Bioclinica.

In February 2020 PPD returned to the stock market, listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol PPD; WilmingtonBiz Magazine called it the second initial public offering in the company’s history. At that point the magazine counted nearly 100 offices in 46 countries and more than 24,000 employees, with close to 1,800 of them in Wilmington and a similar number at a second North Carolina office in Morrisville.

How research organisations present themselves.

Contract research organisations sell a service rather than a product. Drug, biotechnology and medical-device companies hire them to plan and run clinical trials, to test compounds before they reach people, to manage laboratories and to collect and analyse the data that regulators review. Because what they sell is largely invisible, their public image is built from people, places and numbers.

The pictures tend to repeat. Corporate sites and annual reports in the category often show clinicians and patients of different ages and backgrounds talking in calm, well-lit consulting rooms; scientists in lab coats working with pipettes and sample plates; and world maps dotted with the countries and sites where studies run. Data dashboards, charts and screens are common too, reflecting how much of the work is now about managing information as well as patients.

Colour follows the same caution. Blues and greens, from deep navy to soft teal, are frequent choices in health care and research branding, usually set against plenty of white, with a clean sans for names and headings. The aim is to look steady and trustworthy rather than playful, and names are often short, sometimes initials or a single coined word, partly because many of these companies are the product of mergers.

The industry also meets in person. Large gatherings such as the DIA Global Annual Meeting and the SCOPE Summit for clinical-operations staff bring sponsors, research organisations and technology suppliers together, and exhibition stands, panels and presentation slides there are another place where these identities are on show. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company’s history and ownership, and treats every colour and typeface here as our own interpretation.

From listed company to a named business inside a group.

The second listing was short. In April 2021 Thermo Fisher Scientific announced a plan to buy PPD, and it completed the acquisition in December 2021. DCAT Value Chain Insights, reporting the completion on 9 December 2021, put PPD’s staff at about 26,000 and said the company would become part of Thermo Fisher’s Laboratory Products and Services segment. Pharmaceutical Commerce, reporting a day later, said the deal would let Thermo Fisher offer services across clinical development, from early science through trial logistics to making the drug product.

PPD did not disappear into its new parent’s name. Its own website now introduces it as “PPD Contract Research for Thermo Fisher Scientific”, keeping the three-letter name as the face of the clinical-research business. The site groups its work under a handful of headings: therapeutic expertise, which it says covers more than 20 therapeutic areas; end-to-end trial delivery; laboratory services; and functional service provider partnerships, in which PPD staff take on a single function, such as clinical operations or drug-safety reporting, across a sponsor’s studies. It also runs offers aimed at smaller biotech companies and digital tools for study planning.

That arrangement gives the name an unusual position. For most of its history PPD was a stand-alone company with its own listing and its own tower in Wilmington; today it is a business brand inside a much larger scientific-equipment and services group, sitting beside the laboratory-supply and manufacturing names Thermo Fisher already owned.

For a design guide, PPD shows how a short set of initials can survive a change of owner and keep working as the label for one line of business. Compare its parent, Thermo Fisher, and IQVIA, another North Carolina research organisation with a name built from letters. For this guide we use a deep coastal blue, ink, sand and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PPD’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.