Jeff Yordon takes a tremendous amount of pride in the work that is done at Sagent Pharmaceuticals Inc. But he completely understands that most people would do just about anything to avoid ever having to use his company’s products.
“Injectable pharmaceuticals by definition are acute drugs,” says Yordon, the company’s chairman and CEO. “These are life and death kinds of drugs. I tell people you don’t want to wake up in a hospital room and see the name Sagent on the label because you know you’ve got a problem.”
Yordon is in his 44th year in the injectable pharmaceutical business. While nobody wants to have to use his product, there are countless people around the world today who wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the medicine that Sagent manufactures.
“We are one of the major suppliers of a drug called heparin in the U.S.,” Yordon says. “Without heparin, there is no surgery. So unless we provide that, surgical procedures won’t happen. Heparin is also one of the most dangerous drugs in the world for the simple reason that there are nine different codes or strengths of heparin — and seven of the nine are in exactly the same size container.”
The bottom line is Yordon and his team of 269 employees at Sagent can’t afford to make mistakes. They also need to do whatever they can to ensure that mistakes aren’t made by those who use the company’s product to help their patients. It’s that mindset that drove Sagent to develop vibrant colored boxes with unique lettering for the different types of heparin to reduce the chances of it getting misused.
“The equivalent of about four 747s going down with everybody being killed is how many people die from heparin mistakes each year,” Yordon says. “I feel tremendous pride that we are significantly lowering that amount and helping to save lives.”
It’s an impressive success story, but there were many skeptics when Yordon set out to construct the company known today as Sagent Pharmaceuticals.
“I am an unusual person,” Yordon says. “I probably had two people out of 100 that said it could work. But you know, when you embark upon something like this, you better damn well believe that it’s going to work or you’re just wasting your time.”
