Quintiles CEO Dennis Gillings is stepping away from the top post of the company he founded and built into the largest clinical research organization in the industry.
Tom Pike, a 22-year veteran of management consultant company Accenture, has been appointed Quintiles’ new CEO. Pike will join the Durham, North Carolina-based CRO on April 30. Gillings will remain with Quintiles as executive chairman of the company’s board of directors. The company said that the move is part of the company’s long-term succession planning.
Pike’s Accenture experience included more than 10 years in management, including a position leading the firm’s North America Health and Products business areas. He also served as global chief operating officer for Accenture’s Resources operating group and was also the company’s chief strategy officer. He left Accenture in 2010 and has since been working with technology and healthcare startups.
“Healthcare is the most important industry of the next quarter century, and I’m excited because Quintiles is right at the center of improving the health of millions of people around the world,” Pike said in a statement.
Gillings founded Quintiles in 1982 while he was a biostatistics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company has grown into a global business with annual revenue of about $3 billion and employs more than 25,000 in 60 countries.
