Focus On: Upsher-Smith builds business with focus on novelty, quality

Not bad for a company that traces its roots back to the early last century. In 1919, the company’s namesake — a chemist and pharmacist, as well as a recent English immigrant to the United States and director of the well-regarded Minnesota Institute of Pharmacy — began his quest to take the cardiac drug digitalis to the next level of innovation. He tilled the fields of his Wayzata, Minn., farm, planted foxglove seeds into the soil, and later harvested their purple-and-white flowers to extract the drug. Upsher Smith started the company Upsher-Smith that same year, and operating in a laboratory in nearby Minneapolis, he figured out how to deliver digitalis in a standardized potency — an advancement never before achieved since the drug’s discovery, and one that put Upsher Smith’s fledgling business on the map. 

Over time, physicians and pharmacists throughout North America made sure that this improved medication benefited thousands of people suffering from congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation. Yet at mid-century, the pharmaceutical industry underwent a revolutionary transformation as synthetic drugs overtook those derived from plants and other natural sources, huge chemical conglomerates grew powerful, and the most successful companies invested heavily in building large sales forces. By the 1960s, despite its early promise, Upsher-Smith had receded into the background.

That all changed in 1969, when Ken Evenstad and his wife Grace received a call from one of her relatives. Her uncle Jim — James Upsher Smith — was selling the family business. Nearly extinct, Upsher-Smith was a very small company with a name that still meant something to pharmacies and pharmaceutical wholesalers and Evenstad, a 25-year-old, Minnesota-born pharmacist with entrepreneurial inclinations, but little money, wanted to buy it. Driven to become a pharmacist because he wanted to help sick people, Evenstad soon came to feel he could help patients even more through his business pursuits, so he scraped together $1,500 and became the new owner. He already had a product idea and had been looking for a vehicle for selling it. 

Evenstad’s first venture was the product SSKI (potassium iodide oral solution, USP), an expectorant for certain lung conditions. The new product was a huge success and Upsher-Smith continued to break new ground, with pioneering advances in the manufacturing of unit-dose generic medications, which helped reduce drug dosing errors and improved the care of hospital patients. These advancements also ushered in a period of rapid growth, as sales reached $1 million by 1977, then doubled in only two years. 

Upsher-Smith then capitalized on its momentum by introducing a series of new products and making a major real estate acquisition. The introduction of Klor-Con (potassium chloride) and anti-arrhythmic medication Pacerone (amiodarone HCl) tablets signaled the arrival of branded generics, and the purchase of Rosemont Pharmaceuticals in 2001 hailed the arrival of new expertise and additional manufacturing capacity. In short order, the company quickly built a new corporate headquarters in Maple Grove, added a Morristown, N.J., office to tap into regulatory expertise on the East Coast and then expanded the Maple Grove headquarters yet again. 

Ken’s son, Mark Evenstad, took the reins of Upsher-Smith in 2003, having spent his formative years learning the business from the inside. Under Mark’s leadership, Upsher-Smith experienced tremendous growth. He expanded beyond generics into the production of innovative central nervous system branded therapies — the highlights being the development and launch of seizure disorder drug Qudexy XR (topiramate) extended-release capsules in 2014 and the ultimate FDA approval of seizure rescue drug Nayzilam (midazolam) nasal spray.