Ash Stevens turns cancer fight into job creator, hires ex-Pfizer scientists

One of Wayne State‘s first spin-off new economy businesses is still going strong in Detroit 40 years later. The company specializing in helping create cancer-fighting medicine is still working away in its little corner of Motown.

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In a little corner of Detroit overlooking the Lodge Freeway and TechTown beyond is one of Detroit‘s first new economy start-ups – Ash Stevens.

The pharmaceutical company was the first business to spin off from Wayne State University‘s Chemistry Department. It became the first tenant of the Detroit Research Park incubator in the early 1960s, a predecessor of TechTown. Unfortunately, no other businesses followed and the Research Park Apartments on Trumbull were built on the land meant to house other new economy start-ups that were supposed to reinvent Detroit‘s economy decades ago.

But Ash Stevens pressed on, creating powders used in cancer-fighting drugs. Today it makes three of the 100 chemical entities the FDA has approved since 2003. Ash Stevens employs 50-plus people, ranging from research & development scientists to factory hands in its Riverview drug manufacturing facility. It plans to expand that plant in the near future.

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