ASP.NET Question — Please Help

I am using ASP.NET/VB.NET code to automatically populate a drop down control with information from a database using a stored procedure. However, when the drop down list populates itself, it includes HTML-specific tags that are hardcoded in the database tables. For example, the dropdown lists “CFO“, rather than “CFO”. Can anyone please offer some example code on how to strip/remove the HTML code so that it doesn’t display in the drop down list? Thanks!