Rick Winningham

In 2014, when Theravance split from Innoviva, Rick Winningham did not pick the easier path. He took the harder one: the spinoff, the uncertain pipeline, the company that had to prove itself from scratch as a standalone biopharma. More than a decade later, Theravance Biopharma is posting record results, and Winningham is still at the wheel.

His career reads like a map of the pharmaceutical industry over the past four decades. He started at Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1986, back when the company was still integrating after its own mergers. By 2001, he was running Global Marketing across cardiovascular, infectious disease, oncology, immunology, and neuroscience - essentially, every disease area that mattered. Then he left for Innoviva, a company then known simply as Theravance, and spent thirteen years building it into a serious respiratory therapeutics player.

The work at Theravance Biopharma has a particular focus: organ-selective medicines. The idea that a drug should act precisely where the disease lives - in the lungs, in the gut, in the autonomic nervous system - rather than flooding the whole body. It's a narrower target, harder to hit, and when it works, it means fewer systemic side effects for patients who often have few other options.

YUPELRI - revefenacin inhalation solution - is the product most visible in Theravance's commercial story. In Q4 2024, hospital-based commercial channel doses grew 49% year-over-year. That number doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone spent years building the right team, the right commercial infrastructure, and the right relationships in hospital systems that are notoriously difficult to navigate.

Winningham earned his MBA in Quantitative Methods and Finance from Texas Christian University - a credential that fits a man who speaks with equal fluency about clinical endpoints and shareholder value. Before that, a B.S. in Finance from Southern Illinois University. Neither institution appears on the standard "biopharma CEO pedigree" checklist. He built the rest on the job.

The 2024 financial results told a complete story: record fourth quarter revenues, $50 million in TRELEGY-related milestones, and a positioning of Theravance's hospital commercial organization that the company says is ready to sustain growth well into 2025 and beyond. The CYPRESS study - focused on ampreloxetine for multiple system atrophy - is on track to enroll its last patient by mid-2025, pushing the company further into rare neurological disease territory.

Outside of Theravance, Winningham serves as Lead Independent Director at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and sits on the boards of Rivus Pharmaceuticals and Retrotope. For nearly a decade, he chaired the California Life Sciences Association - one of the most influential state-level life sciences advocacy groups in the country. The CLSA role wasn't ceremonial. California's regulatory and legislative environment for biotech is a live wire, and someone has to hold it.

More than half of Theravance Biopharma's senior leadership team are women. In an industry where that number typically hovers well below 30%, Theravance's composition is unusual enough to warrant an explanation. The explanation is Rick Winningham.

Over four decades, he has made a deliberate practice of identifying emerging talent and creating the conditions for it to be seen. Not in the passive way that executives sometimes gesture toward diversity - but in the way where someone actually picks up the phone and says, "You should be in this meeting," or "I'm going to put you forward for this role."

The Healthcare Businesswomen's Association recognized this in 2026 with its Honorable Mentor Award - given annually to a single executive who has used their influence to expand opportunity and advocate for representation at every career stage. The award is calibrated to distinguish genuine sponsorship from box-checking. Winningham has been doing this for longer than the award has existed.

His philosophy, stated plainly: "You have to be intentional about who you see and who you sponsor." The word "intentional" appears frequently when Winningham talks about leadership. It's the difference between a leader who says the right things in all-hands meetings and a leader who changes the composition of a company's senior team over time.

Employees at Theravance rate his leadership effectiveness at 80 out of 100 on Comparably. That's the kind of score that results from two things: performance and how people feel working for you. Getting both right simultaneously, over a decade-plus tenure, is its own kind of achievement.

His August 2025 appearance on "The BioHub: The Top Voices in Biotech" podcast - Episode 61 - gave him a platform to discuss this leadership journey with a broader audience. The conversation covered Theravance's strategic direction as much as it did the human side of building a team. The two, in Winningham's view, are not separate topics.