GlaxoSmithKline plc is a British multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, England. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company according to Forbes as of 2019. The company developed the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S, which it said in 2014, it would make available for five percent above cost.
About GlaxoSmithKline in brief
GlaxoSmithKline plc is a British multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, England. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company according to Forbes as of 2019. The company developed the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S, which it said in 2014, it would make available for five percent above cost. 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 US$3 billion settlement in 2012. As of August 2016, it had a market capitalisation of £81 billion, the fourth largest on the London Stock Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It is ranked #296 on the 2019 Fortune 500, ranked behind other pharmaceutical companies including China Resources, Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Sinopharm, Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, Merck, and Sanofi. It 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. Its first pharmaceutical product, released in 1924, was vitamin D. In 1959, the Wellcome Foundation bought Cooper, McDougall & Robertson Inc to become more active in animal health.
The Elion-Hitchings Building was celebrated worldwide when it was built, according to Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation president Kelvin Dickinson. 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 1983, the American arm of GSK moved to Research Triangle Park and Zebulon in North Carolina. In 2012, it announced plans to tear down the United Therapeutics, which bought the building in 2012, which will be torn down in 2020. In 2013, it acquired the California-based Affymatic, a combinatorial chemistry leader in the field of combial chemistry. In 2014, the company restructured its R&D operation, cutting 10,000 jobs worldwide, closing its R & D facility in Beckenham, Kent, and opening a Medicines Research Centre in Stevenage, Kent. In 2015, it bought the U.S.-based drug maker Affymic, which is based in California, and bought the UK-based research centre in Hertfordshire. In 2016, the two companies merged to form GlaxosmithKline Wellcome plc, which merged in 1995, to form GSK Wellcome plc. In 2009, it was announced that the company would be selling its Wellcome Wellcome division.
You want to know more about GlaxoSmithKline?
This page is based on the article GlaxoSmithKline published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
