SmithKline Beecham

GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) is a British multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, London. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world's sixth largest pharmaceutical company as of 2015, after Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, Hoffmann-La Roche and Sanofi. Emma Walmsley became CEO on 31 March 2017 and is the first female CEO of the company. The company has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. As of August 2016 it had a market capitalisation of £81 billion (around $107 billion), the fourth largest on the London Stock Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange. GSK's drugs and vaccines earned revenue of £21.3 billion in 2013. Its top-selling products that year were Advair, Avodart, Flovent, Augmentin, Lovaza and Lamictal. GSK's consumer products, which earned revenue of £5.2 billion in 2013, include Sensodyne and Aquafresh toothpaste, the malted-milk drink Horlicks, Abreva for cold sores, Breathe Right nasal strips, Nicoderm and Nicorette nicotine replacements, and Night Nurse, a cold remedy. The company developed the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S, which it said in 2014 it would make available for five percent above cost. Legacy products developed at GSK include several listed in the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines, such as amoxicillin, mercaptopurine, pyrimethamine and zidovudine. In 2012 GSK pleaded guilty to promotion of drugs for unapproved uses, failure to report safety data, and kickbacks to physicians in the United States and agreed to pay a $3 billion (£1.9bn) settlement. It was the largest health-care fraud case to date in that country and the largest settlement by a drug company. Joseph Nathan and Co. was founded in 1873 as a general trading company in Wellington, New Zealand, by a Londoner, Joseph Edward Nathan. In 1904 it began producing a dried-milk baby food from excess milk produced on dairy farms near Bunnythorpe. The resulting product was first known as Defiance, then as Glaxo (from lacto), and sold with the slogan 'Glaxo builds bonny babies.':306 The Glaxo Laboratories sign is still visible (right) on what is now a car repair shop on the main street of Bunnythorpe. The company's first pharmaceutical product, released in 1924, was vitamin D.:306 Glaxo Laboratories was incorporated as a distinct subsidiary company in London in 1935. Joseph Nathan's shareholders reorganised the group's structure in 1947 making Glaxo the parent and obtained a listing on the London Stock Exchange. Glaxo acquired Allen & Hanburys in 1958. The Scottish pharmacologist David Jack was hired as a researcher for Allen & Hanburys a few years after Glaxo took it over; he went on to lead the company's R&D until 1987.:306 After Glaxo bought Meyer Laboratories in 1978, it began to play an important role in the US market. In 1983 the American arm, Glaxo Inc., moved to Research Triangle Park (US headquarters/research) and Zebulon (US manufacturing) in North Carolina. Burroughs Wellcome & Company was founded in 1880 in London by the American pharmacists Henry Wellcome and Silas Burroughs. The Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories opened in 1902. In the 1920s Burroughs Wellcome established research and manufacturing facilities in Tuckahoe, New York,:18 which served as the US headquarters until the company moved to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in 1971. The Nobel Prize winning scientists Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings worked there and invented drugs still used many years later, such as mercaptopurine. In 1959 the Wellcome Foundation bought Cooper, McDougall & Robertson Inc to become more active in animal health. Glaxo and Wellcome merged in 1995 to form Glaxo Wellcome plc. Glaxo Wellcome restructured its R&D operation that year, cutting 10,000 jobs worldwide, closing its R&D facility in Beckenham, Kent, and opening a Medicines Research Centre in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Also that year, Glaxo Wellcome acquired the California-based Affymax, a leader in the field of combinatorial chemistry.