Steven Quay

Steven Carl Quay (born November 1950) Previously, he founded the medical imaging company Salutar and the drug delivery company Sonus Pharmaceuticals, and led Nastech Pharmaceutical Company as chairman and CEO.

Since 2020, Quay has been a proponent of the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, on which he has testified before the United States Congress. He then carried out postdoctoral research in the chemistry department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khorana, and completed his residency in anatomical pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1983, while still on the Stanford faculty, Quay founded Salutar, Inc., a California medical imaging company developing chelated-metal contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Salutar was acquired by the Norwegian imaging firm Nycomed in 1990.

In 2021, Quay published a book, The Origin of the Virus: The hidden truths behind the microbe that killed millions of people, along with Angus Dalgleish and Paolo Barnard. The book claims that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab. He is also an author of a book named Stay Safe: A Physician's Guide to Survive Coronavirus.

In August 2026, Politico reported that Quay was a candidate to succeed Anthony Fauci as head of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. and has never received a NIH award, per NIH Reporter.