Pfizer, Inc. (/ˈfaɪzər/) (NYSE: PFE) is an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation headquartered in New York City, and with its research headquarters in Groton, Connecticut, United States. It is the world's largest pharmaceutical company by revenues. 
 

Pfizer develops and produces medicines and vaccines for a wide range of conditions including in the areas of immunology and inflammation, oncology, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, neuroscience and pain. Pfizer's products include Lipitor (atorvastatin, used to lower blood cholesterol); the neuropathic pain/fibromyalgia drug Lyrica (pregabalin); the oral antifungal medication Diflucan (fluconazole), the antibiotic Zithromax (azithromycin), Viagra (sildenafil, for erectile dysfunction), and the anti-inflammatory Celebrex (celecoxib) (also known as Celebra in some countries).
 

Pfizer was founded by cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart in New York City in 1849 as a manufacturer of fine chemicals. Pfizer's discovery of Terramycin (oxytetracycline) in 1950 put it on a path towards becoming a research-based pharmaceutical company. Pfizer has made numerous acquisitions, including of Warner–Lambert in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth in 2009, the latter acquired for US$68 billion.[4][5] Pfizer is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and its shares have been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since April 8, 2004. 
 

In September 2009, Pfizer pleaded guilty to the illegal marketing of the arthritis drug Bextra for uses unapproved by the FDA, and agreed to a $2.3 billion settlement, the largest health care fraud settlement at that time. Pfizer also paid the U.S. government $1.3 billion in criminal fines related to the "off-label" marketing of Bextra, the largest penalty ever rendered for any crime. Called a repeat offender, this was Pfizer's fourth such settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in the previous ten years. 
 

History

1849 to 2000

 

Charles Pfizer
 

Pfizer is named after German-American cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart (originally from Ludwigsburg, Germany) who launched a fine chemicals business, Charles Pfizer and Company, from a building at the intersection of Harrison Avenue and Bartlett Street  in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1849. There, they produced an antiparasitic called santonin. This was an immediate success, although it was the production of citric acid that really kick-started Pfizer's growth in the 1880s. Pfizer continued to buy property to expand its lab and factory on the block bounded by Bartlett Street; Harrison Avenue; Gerry Street; and Flushing Avenue. That facility was used by Pfizer until 2005, when Pfizer closed its original plant along with several others.

Pfizer established its original administrative headquarters at 81 Maiden Lane in Manhattan. By 1906, sales totaled nearly $3 million.
 

World War I caused a shortage of calcium citrate that Pfizer imported from Italy for the manufacture of citric acid, and the company began a search for an alternative supply. Pfizer chemists learned of a fungus that ferments sugar to citric acid and were able to commercialize production of citric acid from this source in 1919. As a result Pfizer developed expertise in fermentation technology. These skills were applied to the mass production of penicillin during World War II, in response to a need from the U.S. government. The antibiotic was needed to treat injured Allied soldiers. In fact, most of the penicillin that went ashore with the troops on D-Day was made by Pfizer.
 

Following the success of penicillin production in the 1940s, penicillin became very inexpensive and Pfizer made very little profit for its efforts. As a result, in the late 1940s Pfizer decided to search for new antibiotics with greater profit potential. The discovery and commercialization of Terramycin (oxytetracycline) by Pfizer in 1950 moved the company on the path of change from a manufacturer of fine chemicals to a research-based pharmaceutical company. To augment its research in fermentation technology, Pfizer began a program to discover drugs through chemical synthesis. Pfizer also established an animal health division in 1959 with an 700-acre (2.8 km2) farm and research facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
 

By the 1950s, Pfizer was established in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Turkey and the United Kingdom. In 1960, the Company moved its medical research laboratory operations to a new facility in Groton, Connecticut. In 1980 Pfizer launched Feldene (piroxicam), a prescription anti-inflammatory medication that became Pfizer's first product to reach a total of a billion United States dollars in sales.
 

During the 1980s and 1990s Pfizer underwent a period of growth sustained by the discovery and marketing of Zoloft, Lipitor, Norvasc, Zithromax, Aricept, Diflucan, and Viagra.
 

2000 to 2011

Pfizer has recently grown by mergers, including those with Warner–Lambert (2000), with Pharmacia (2003), and with Wyeth (2009).
 

Development of torcetrapib, a drug that increases production of HDL, or "good cholesterol", which reduces LDL thought to be correlated to heart disease, was cancelled in December 2006.

During a Phase III clinical trial involving 15,000 patients there were more deaths than expected in the group that took the medicine, and a 60% increase in deaths was seen among patients taking torcetrapib plus Lipitor versus Lipitor alone. There was no suggestion these results called into question the safety of Lipitor. Pfizer lost nearly $1 billion invested developing the failed drug, and the market value of the company plummeted in the aftermath. 
 

A July 2010 article in BusinessWeek reported that Pfizer was seeing more success in its battle against makers of counterfeit prescription drugs by pursuing civil lawsuits rather than criminal prosecution. Pfizer has hired customs and narcotics experts from all over the globe to track down fakes and assemble evidence that can be used to pursue civil suits for trademark infringement. Since 2007, Pfizer has spent $3.3 million on investigations and legal fees and recovered about $5.1 million, with another $5 million tied up in ongoing cases. 

Warner–Lambert acquisition

Pfizer acquired Warner–Lambert in 2000.  Warner–Lambert was founded as a drug store in 1856 in Philadelphia by William R. Warner. Inventing a tablet-coating process gained Warner a place in the Smithsonian Institution. Parke–Davis was founded in Detroit in 1866, by Hervey Parke and George Davis. Warner–Lambert took over Parke–Davis in 1976, and acquired Wilkinson Sword in 1993 and Agouron in 1999.

Pharmacia acquisition

In 2002, Pfizer merged with Pharmacia. The merger was again driven in part by the desire to acquire full rights to a product, this time Celebrex (celecoxib), the COX-2 selective inhibitor previously jointly marketed by Searle (acquired by Pharmacia) and Pfizer. In the ensuing years, Pfizer commenced with a massive restructuring resulting in numerous site closures and loss of jobs including: Terre Haute, IN; Holland, MI; Groton, CT; Brooklyn, NY; Sandwich, UK and Puerto Rico.
 

Pharmacia had been formed by a series of mergers and acquisition, with its predecessors including Searle, Upjohn and Sugen.
 

Searle was founded in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1888. The founder was Gideon Daniel Searle. In 1908, the company was incorporated in Chicago. In 1941, the company established headquarters in Skokie, Illinois. It was acquired by the Monsanto Company, headquartered in St. Louis, in 1985.
 

The Upjohn Company was a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm founded in 1886 in Kalamazoo, Michigan by Dr. William E. Upjohn, an 1875 graduate of the University of Michigan medical school. The company was originally formed to make friable pills, which were specifically designed to be easily digested. In 1995, Upjohn merged with Pharmacia, to form Pharmacia & Upjohn. Pharmacia was created in April 2000 through the merger of Pharmacia & Upjohn with the Monsanto Company and its G.D. Searle unit. The merged company was based in Peapack, New Jersey. The agricultural division was spun off from Pharmacia, as Monsanto, in preparation for the close of the acquisition by Pfizer. 
 

SUGEN was a company focused on protein kinase inhibitors, founded in 1991 in Redwood City, California and acquired by Pharmacia in 1999. The company pioneered the use of ATP-mimetic small molecules to block signal transduction. After the Pfizer merger, the SUGEN site was shut down in 2003, with the loss of over 300 jobs, and the transfer of several programs to Pfizer. These included sunitinib (Sutent), which was approved for human use by the FDA in January 2006, passed $1 bn in annual revenues for Pfizer in 2010. A related compound SU11654 (Toceranib) was also approved for canine tumors, and the ALK inhibitor Crizotinib also grew out of a SUGEN program.
 

In 2008, Pfizer announced 275 job cuts at the Kalamazoo manufacturing facility. Kalamazoo was previously the world headquarters for the Upjohn Company. 

Wyeth acquisition

On January 26, 2009, after more than a year of talks between the two companies, Pfizer agreed to buy pharmaceuticals rival Wyeth for a combined US$68 billion in cash, shares and loans, including some US$22.5 billion lent by five major Wall Street banks. The deal cemented Pfizer's position as the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, with the merged company generating over US$20 billion in cash each year, and was the largest corporate merger since AT&T and BellSouth's US$70 billion deal in March 2006. Wyeth's management team is expected to depart following the merger. The combined company could save US$4 billion annually through the streamlining of operations; however, as part of the deal, both companies must repatriate billions of dollars in revenue from foreign sources to the United States, which will result in higher tax costs. The acquisition was completed on October 15, 2009, making Wyeth a wholly owned subsidiary of Pfizer. 
 

The merger received a vast array of criticism. Harvard Business School’s Gary Pisano told The Wall Street Journal that "The record of big mergers and acquisitions in Big Pharma has just not been good. There’s just been an enormous amount of shareholder wealth destroyed".
 

The Warner–Lambert and Pharmacia mergers do not appear to have achieved gains for shareholders so it is unclear who will benefit from the Wyeth–Pfizer merger to many critics. 
 

King Pharmaceuticals acquisition

In October 2010, Pfizer agreed to buy King Pharmaceuticals for $3.6 billion in cash or $14.25 per share: an approximately 40% premium over King’s closing share price 11th October 2010. 

2011 to present

In February 2011 it was announced that it was to close its research and development facility in Kent, which employs 2,400 people. 
 

In April 2011 Pfizer agreed to sell its Capsugel unit, the world's largest maker of hard capsules, for about $2.38 billion to the private equity firm KKR & Co. The cash will be used for a part of share buyback about $5 billion planned for 2011. 
 

In 2012 Pfizer announced its plan to spin-off its Animal Health group, to be called Zoetis. 
 

On September 4, 2012, the FDA approved a Pfizer pill for a rare type of leukemia. The medicine, called Bosulif, treats chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a blood and bone marrow disease that usually affects older adults. 
 

Operations

 

The headquarters of Pfizer Japan in Tokyo
 

Pfizer has four divisions: Human Health ($44.28B in 2005 sales), Consumer Healthcare ($3.87B in 2005 sales), Animal Health ($2.2B in 2005 sales), and Corporate Groups (which includes legal, finance, and HR). On June 26, 2006, Pfizer announced that it would sell its Consumer Healthcare unit (manufacturer of Listerine, Nicorette, Visine, Sudafed and Neosporin) to Johnson & Johnson for $16.6 billion. 
 

Research and development

Pfizer Global Research and Development is Pfizer's research and development division. In 2007, Pfizer invested $8.1 billion in research and development, the largest R&D investment in the pharmaceutical industry. 
 

Pfizer's human research and development operations are headquartered in New London, CT, and its animal health research and development operations are headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Pfizer has R&D facilities in the following locations: Groton, Connecticut; La Jolla, California (around 1,000 staff, focused on cancer drugs); South San Francisco, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kalamazoo, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Sandwich, United Kingdom; and Cambridge, United Kingdom.
 

In 2007, Pfizer announced plans to close or sell on the Loughbeg API facility, located at Loughbeg, Ringaskiddy Co.Cork Ireland by mid to end of 2008. In 2007, Pfizer announced plans to completely close the Ann Arbor, Nagoya and Amboise Research facilities by the end of 2008, eliminating 2,160 jobs and idling the $300-million dollar Michigan facility, which had seen millions of dollars of expansion in recent years. 
 

On June 18, 2007 Pfizer announced that it would move the Animal Health Research (VMRD) division based in Sandwich, England to Kalamazoo, Michigan. On February 1, 2011 Pfizer announced the closure of the Research and Development centre in Sandwich, with the loss of 2,400 jobs. Pfizer subsequently announced that it would maintain a significant presence at Sandwich, with around 650 staff continuing to be based at the site. 
 

On September 1, 2011 Pfizer announced that it had agreed to a 10-year lease of more than 180,000 square feet of research space from MIT in a building to be constructed at 610 Main Street South, just north of the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. The space will house Pfizer’s Cardiovascular, Metabolic and Endocrine Disease Research Unit and its Neuroscience Research Unit — and Pfizer anticipates moving into the space once it is completed in late 2013. 
 

Products currently in Pfizer's development pipeline include dimebon and tanezumab.