Astra AB

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Astra AB was a former international pharmaceutical company headquartered in

anti-infective
agents.

History

The issue of domestic industrial production of pharmaceuticals in Sweden, as opposed to manual preparations by pharmacists, had been discussed among Swedish pharmacists since mid-1890s.

CEO of the company.[3]

In 1918, dye-producer AB Svensk färgämnesindustri (ASF) bought Astra. ASF planned to create a large Swedish chemical group rivaling those in continental Europe. However, ASF was unsuccessful, and the company soon had large financial problems and was liquidated in 1920. Astra was bailed out and acquired by the Swedish government through its monopoly liquor-producing company Vin- & Spritcentralen, with the intention to form a national monopoly for pharmaceutical production. These plans met with resistance, and therefore a Swedish merchant, Erik Kistner, formed a consortium which bought debt-ridden Astra back from the government for a symbolic price of one krona. The consortium included banker Jacob Wallenberg, and the Wallenberg family since continued to have a stake in the company.

Under long-serving CEO

sulfa drug Sulfathiazole was one of the results of these research activities. The company Tika was acquired in 1939, and the pharmaceutical factories of Paul G. Nordström in Hässleholm
(later renamed to Hässle, and operated as a division of Astra) in 1942. This established Astra as the leading Swedish pharmaceutical company.

In the 1940s, two product families were established which were to become quite important to Astra:

Xylocain
, which was introduced on the Swedish market in 1948.

The profits from these product families funded the development of new drugs. Many of the drugs which were introduced by Astra from the 1960s originated with its Hässle division, which had been relocated from Hässleholm to

Losec against gastroesophageal
conditions, introduced in 1988.

A drug which hadn't been developed by Astra, but that the company distributed in Sweden under its own name under the designation

Contergan and was also sold under the name Thalidomide
in other countries. In late 1961 this drug was connected to a number of birth defects in Germany and was withdrawn from the German market. Three weeks later Astra's Neurosedyn was withdrawn in Sweden, after having been on the market slightly less than three years. It turned out that around one hundred Swedish children had suffered deformation from their mothers taking the supposedly safe drug during their pregnancies, as the Swedish part of the wider Thalidomide scandal affecting around 10,000 worldwide. After complicated legal turns in the 1960s, a settlement was reached in 1969, whereby Astra set aside certain compensation funds for the victims. This turn of events led to a revision of safety thinking in drug development, and to date it is still considered as the worst tragedy and scandal in the history of the Swedish pharmaceutical industry.

In 1983 Astra withdrew its neuropharmacological drug

Stockholm stock exchange
, to a large extent due to profits from Losec.

Responding to increasing development costs of new drugs and a perception that the pharmaceutical industry needed more international fusions, Astra started to look for partners. On December 9, 1998, plans for a fusion with Zeneca was announced, which would create the world's third largest pharmaceutical company. Despite some initial criticism of the plans, owners representing 96.4% of the stock voted for the fusion, which was effected in 1999.

References

  1. ^ Staff. "Merger partners in brief". AstraZeneca. Archived from the original on 25 August 2006. Retrieved 2006-08-19.
  2. ^ "Lokalbedövning och magmedicin lyfte Astra mot stjärnorna - Läkemedelsvärlden - Oberoende om läkemedel". Archived from the original on 2010-08-27. Retrieved 2009-01-26.
  3. ISBN 9788821439049
    .
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