PharmAgra Labs, Inc.

When Roger Frisbee and Peter Newsome decided that PharmAgra Labs — the company they founded in 1999 — was going to be acquired, one thing was for certain: that someone was going to need to be a believer in Transylvania County. The two North Carolina natives started their aptly named company as a research partner, partially for Big Pharma and partially for agricultural work. Not long after the company was founded, the agricultural work died out, and the two shifted PharmAgra’s focus toward building custom molecules for clients. In 2012, the company was awarded a fellowship to help commercialize dermal and cosmetic applications.