Upjohn Company merger

Pharmacia Upjohn Inc. is one of the fifteen largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It was formed in 1995 through a merger of the Swedish company Pharmacia AB and The Upjohn Company from the US. Pharmacia Upjohn delivers products in several therapeutic areas such as oncology, growth and metabolic disorders, neurology, nutrient administration and smoking cessation. 

Before the formation of Pharmacia through the merger of Pharmacia Upjohn with Monsanto-Searle in 2000, each company had its own approaches to augment and diversify their compound collections, and these approaches set the stage for the procedure implemented at Pharmacia. Thus, it was felt that a brief description of the historical background to the present work would be informative and would afford additional insights that bear directly on the development of the compound acquisition strategy described here. 

Within the pharmaceutical industry itself, the wish of each company s management to see its firm reach what is considered a critical size remained a constant feature as the century came to an end and the new millennium began. It led to new national and transnational mergers. In France, Sanofi (Elf Aquitaine) merged with Synthelabo (L Oreal) and Laboratoires Pierre Fabre with BioMerieux. Elsewhere the Swedish Astra and the British Zeneca combined their operations Pharmacia-Upjohn took control of Monsanto and two giant firms, Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, announced their intention to combine their activities, which would lead to a group with a turnover of 25 billion, exceeded only by Pfizer after its acquisition of Warner Lambert. 

In 1995, Upjohn merged with Pharmacia to form Pharmacia and Upjohn and then, in 2000, Pharmacia and Upjohn merged with Monsanto to form a new company, Pharmacia. In each of these mergers, the discovery chemistry and biology databases... 

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