Pharmaceutical companies Rhone Poulenc Rorer

You will have noticed that some of these companies have fingers in many pies. These companies, or groups as they should be called, are the real giants of organic chemistry. Rhone-Poulenc, the French group which includes pharmaceuticals (Rhone-Poulenc-Rorer), animal health, agrochemicals, chemicals, fibres, and polymers, had sales of about 90 billion French Francs in 1996. Dow, the US group which includes chemicals, plastics, hydrocarbons, and other bulk chemicals, had sales of about 20 billion US dollars in 1996. 

In the mid-1990s Hoechst Celanese made two moves to support its new focus on pharmaceuticals. In 1995 it bought Marion Merrell Dow from Dow Chemical. At the end of the next year, Hoechst Celanese acquired the remaining interest in its French subsidiary Roussel Uclaf on the open market for 7.1 billion. It then combined these units into a new entity, Hoechst Marion Roussel (HMR). Then, in 1999, as further discussed in Chapter 9, HMR joined with Rhone-Poulenc Rorer in still another megamerger to produce Aventis. Following this deal, Aventis continued to spin off the chemical properties of its constituent companies, a story well beyond the scope of this book. 

Rhone-Poulenc Rorer has groups of computational chemists in France, England, and the United States. Like most other pharmaceutical companies, however, Rhone-Poulenc makes use of commercial software as black boxes, and thus the pioneering efforts of French software developers are of little influence. 

Note to Readers Most chemists know this compound as taxol, but it now has the generic name paclitaxel and the registered trade name Taxol (Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, New York, NY). Taxotere here refers to the drug now generically referred to as docetaxel with the registered trade name Taxotere (Rhone-Poulenc-Rorer Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Collegeville, PA). 

Pethaps one of the less welcome forays of the French government into the pharmaceutical sector was over the fate of Aventis in early 004. Although Aventis has been described as a Franco-German company (as a result of the 1999 merger between Germany s Hoechst Marion Roussel and France s Rhone-Poulenc Rorer), in the context of its future, the company s French origins appear to have dominated. 

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