Aquestive Therapeutics has appointed Rich Daly to its board of directors, adding a commercial operator with three decades of rare disease and specialty pharmaceutical experience to a company preparing for its next phase of growth. The New Jersey based company announced the appointment on 2026-09-29, and Daly takes his seat in the middle of October.
Daly is President of Global Rare Disease at Angelini Pharma, the Italian pharmaceutical group, a role that places him at the centre of one of the industry's most commercially demanding segments. He arrived there by way of Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer until Angelini Pharma acquired the business. That transaction gave him the unusual perspective of having built a rare disease commercial organisation and then integrated one.
His earlier career runs through several of the largest names in the sector. He was Executive Vice President for the Americas at Takeda, and before that President of the United States diabetes business at AstraZeneca, where he led the commercial launches of Farxiga and Myalept. He began his career at Abbott Laboratories. Alongside those operating roles he has been Chairman and Chief Executive of Neuralstem, President of CARsgen Therapeutics, and Chief Operating Officer of both BeyondSpring Pharmaceuticals and Seed Therapeutics.
He also brings a record of public company governance that is directly relevant to the seat he now occupies. He has previously served on the boards of Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, Opiant Pharmaceuticals, Neuralstem and Synergy Pharmaceuticals, which is a wider span of listed small and mid cap life sciences companies than most incoming directors can claim.
The appointment fits a familiar pattern among commercial stage biopharmaceutical companies. Aquestive develops and commercialises therapies using its own oral film technology, and companies at that stage of maturity increasingly recruit directors who have carried a profit and loss account rather than directors who have only supervised one. Daly's value to the board is less about scientific oversight, which the company already has, and more about the mechanics of pricing, payer access and launch execution in markets where patient populations are small and the commercial margin for error is correspondingly thin.
There is a second reading worth noting. Daly's rare disease experience sits on both sides of a transaction, as a seller and as an acquirer's executive. Boards of companies in Aquestive's position frequently find themselves assessing partnership, licensing or outright sale proposals, and a director who has sat on both sides of that table is a practical asset in those discussions, whatever the company's stated intentions.
The appointment was announced through a wire release and the company did not disclose any accompanying change to its board committees at the time of the announcement.
