Burroughs Wellcome & Company
Burroughs Wellcome & Company was a British pharmaceutical company founded in 1880 and merged with Glaxo in 1996 .
history
On September 27, 1880, the two American pharmacists Henry Wellcome and Silas Burroughs (who was Wyeth's sole agent in London at the time) founded Burroughs Wellcome & Company . The first business premises were in Snow Hill , London. As early as 1883, the company moved into larger business premises in one of the first local buildings to be illuminated with the new Edison Electric Light . The company headquarters stayed in this building for the next 60 years until it was destroyed by bombs in The Blitz in 1941.
In 1883, the first factory in Bell Lane Wharf in Wandsworth was acquired to be the first in England to produce tablets. The machines required for this were acquired from Wyeth in New York. Because of the limitations of these machines, Burroughs put together a team of engineers in 1888 to develop a new machine. This soon went into production and was able to produce 600 tablets of high precision in one minute. This new technology gave Burroughs Wellcome a clear edge over its competitors. In order to gain a further head start, Wellcome registered the name tabloid (tablet) as a trademark in 1884 .
Burroughs developed the activity of pharmaceutical representatives: personal visits to individual doctors to convince them of their own products. After Burroughs' unexpected death in 1895, Henry Wellcome became sole owner of the company.
In 1902, after Wellcome's tropical tours, the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories opened in Sudan to research tropical diseases, and Andrew Balfour became its first director. In 1912, the leadership of the laboratories was handed over to the Sudanese government, Balfour returned to London, where he took over the management of the newly established Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research . In 1936 these institutions became the non-profit Wellcome Trust . The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum was created in 1913 from the extensive medical collection of Henry Wellcomes .
In 1959, Burroughs Wellcome & Company bought McDougall & Robertson Inc. to expand its animal health activities. In 1970, Wellcome's production was relocated from New York to North Carolina, and another research center was built the following year.
In 1995 the merger with the company Glaxo took place to form the new company Glaxo Wellcome . The company was later merged into GlaxoSmithKline .
Products
Burroughs Wellcome & Company played an important role in the development of zidovudine (Retrovir), a drug that restricts the spread of the HIV virus .
Awards
In 1988 the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings , both employees of Burroughs Wellcome & Company.
literature
- Report of the Wellcome tropical research laboratories at the Gordon memorial college, Khartoum (1904)
- Patrick F. D'Arcy: Laboratory on the Nile: A History of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories , Haworth Press 1999, ISBN 0-7890-0728-2
- Robert Rhodes James: Henry Wellcome , Hodder & Stoughton, London 1994. Museums Journal Vol 86 1986.
- H. Turner: Henry Wellcome The Man, His Collection and His Legacy , Heinemann Educational Books, London 1980
- Penny Bailey: Henry Wellcome the salesman , Wellcome Trust 2008
- Penny Bailey: The birth and growth of Burroughs Wellcome & Co. , Wellcome Trust 2008