By Adam Sylvain

It was April 1975 when Cuong Do D’88 T’89 and his family boarded one of the last C-130 flights out of Saigon near the end of the Vietnam War.

A credit to good fortune and his father’s persistence, all three of Do’s siblings, his parents, and several members of their extended family were able to board the plane at a time when departing groups were typically limited to parties of two or three people.

“We had two hours’ notice to pack up our things and get to the airport,” recalls Do. “We were the lucky ones and came to the U.S. with $20 to our name and a change of clothes.”

Fifty years later, as president and CEO of BioVie, Do is leading the charge in developing novel therapies to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. If he is successful, Do believes a drug they are developing could represent the first truly effective treatment for Alzheimer’s and the first new drug for Parkinson’s in more than five decades.

Do’s career-long quest to create maximum impact in the world through innovations at the intersection of health care and technology can be traced back to his family’s arrival in Oklahoma, where they ultimately settled after fleeing Saigon.

Initially, neither Do nor his siblings spoke any English, a limitation he says they overcame quickly by “watching a lot of TV and reading anything we could get our hands on.” With little effort, Do excelled in school and parlayed an early interest in immunology—a fixture in TIME magazine headlines at the time—into an apprenticeship of sorts at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.

“My mom worked down the street from the medical school and took it upon herself to find someone who was willing to talk with me,” says Do. “A researcher took me under his wing, and I started working in his lab when I was 14.”

The valedictorian of his high school class, Do had his pick of colleges but was drawn to Dartmouth for its intimate size, figuring he’d receive more attention and be more comfortable in Hanover than at a larger school. Double majoring in biochemistry and economics, Do applied and was accepted to Stanford Medical School but came to an important realization during his junior year at Dartmouth.

“I realized doctors were the worst managers around and I felt I could have a greater impact as a business leader than as a clinician working with individual patients,” he says.

Do took advantage of the 3-2 program that existed at the time and began taking MBA classes at Tuck during his senior year. The youngest student in his Tuck class, he says his closest friend, and a future groomsman at his wedding, happened to be the oldest. In comparison to his classmates, Do admits his experience was atypical.

“On the one hand, I was the least experienced person in my class, so discussion in courses like Organizational Behavior went right over my head,” he says. “At the same time, I picked things up quickly in other classes since I was three years into my time at Dartmouth and had fine-tuned my study habits pretty well by that point.”

After Tuck, Do joined McKinsey, one of a few dozen employees in its newly launched health care practice. By the time he left as a senior partner 17 years later, McKinsey’s health care practice had grown to become one of the largest and most respected health care consultancies in the world.

Several years into his tenure at McKinsey, Do took an opportunity in Korea where he helped build out the firm’s high-tech and corporate finance practices. He also led McKinsey’s first project with Samsung, the start of a relationship that was instrumental in Do’s later decision to join Samsung as president of its global strategy group.

Do is the first to say he never aspired to become a CEO, preferring strategy roles that offered more space and freedom to “get things done.” After leaving McKinsey in 2006, he served as chief strategy officer for Lenovo, Tyco Electronics, and Merck, before joining Samsung in 2015.

While at Merck, Do led the charge of putting additional resources behind a previously tiny and underdeveloped research program. That program ultimately produced Keytruda, the highest selling oncology drug of all time.  

“Last year, $30 billion was spent on Keytruda, which of course is just a metric for the many, many lives it has impacted,” says Do.

In 2021, Do was serving on the board of BioVie, a biopharma company founded by Tuck classmate Jonathan Adams T’89, when he led the acquisition of a drug that he believes could have a similar impact for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s patients. The last condition of the acquisition deal was that he step in as CEO.

“If not for my deep and genuine conviction that this drug can make a real difference in the world, I wouldn’t be in this seat,” he says.

Beyond his professional achievements, Do has expanded his impact through nonprofit board service and philanthropy, including as a valued member of Tuck’s Board of Advisors. Do also serves, or has served, on the boards of the educational nonprofits Fulbright University Vietnam, Caring for Cambodia, Celebrate the Children, Exceptional Minds; the autism advocacy and research organization Autism Speaks; and the arts organizations Paper Mill Playhouse and GableStage.

His advice for Tuck students is to take “maximum prudent risk” early in their careers, following poet Robert Frost’s maxim in choosing “the road less traveled by.” Do also cites former Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey who implored graduates to “make the world’s problems your problems.”

For Do, leadership in business, and in life, all boils down to a single mission: “Do what you can to help others and make the world a better place.”