"Bayer Bayer AG (; ) is a German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Headquartered in Leverkusen, where its illuminated corporate logo, the Bayer cross, is a landmark, Bayer's areas of business include human and veterinary pharmaceuticals; consumer healthcare products; agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products; and high-value polymers. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index. Werner Baumann has been CEO since 2016. Founded in Barmen in 1863 as a dyestuffs factory, Bayer's first and best-known product was aspirin. In 1898 Bayer trademarked the name"
"nausea and gastric pain. He also said he had invented the name ""aspirin"" and was the first person to use the new formulation to test its safety and efficacy. Bayer contends that aspirin was discovered by Felix Hoffmann to help his father, who had arthritis. Various sources support the conflicting claims. Most mainstream historians attribute the invention of aspirin to Hoffmann and/or Eichengrün. Heroin (diacetylmorphine), now illegal as an addictive drug, was introduced as a non-addictive substitute for morphine, and trademarked and marketed by Bayer from 1898 to 1910 as a cough suppressant and over-the-counter treatment for other common ailments,"
"was approved for human use under the brand name of Coumadin. Examples of genericization before the modern system of generic drugs include aspirin, introduced to the market in 1897, and heroin, introduced in 1898. Both were originally trademarks of Bayer AG. However, U.S. court rulings in 1918 and 1921 found the terms to be genericized, stating the company's failure to reinforce the brand's connection with their product as the reason. Bayer's involvement in the Great Phenol Plot during World War I, and subsequently the U.S. declaration of war on Germany, were also involved in the case of aspirin and heroin."
"""heroin"" for the drug diacetylmorphine and marketed it as a cough suppressant and non-addictive substitute for morphine until 1910. Bayer also introduced phenobarbital; prontosil, the first widely used antibiotic and the subject of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine; the antibiotic Cipro (ciprofloxacin); and Yaz (drospirenone) birth control pills. In 1925 Bayer was one of six chemical companies that merged to form IG Farben, the world's largest chemical and pharmaceutical company. The Allied Control Council seized IG Farben after World War II, because of its role in the Nazi war effort and involvement in the Holocaust, which included using slave"
"half to two times more potent than morphine itself. The head of Bayer's research department reputedly coined the drug's new name, ""heroin,"" based on the German ""heroisch"", which means ""heroic, strong"" (from the ancient Greek word ""heros, ήρως""). Bayer scientists were not the first to make heroin, but their scientists discovered ways to make it, and Bayer led commercialization of heroin. In 1895, the German drug company Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin. It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine's addictive side-effects. Morphine at the"
"time was a popular recreational drug, and Bayer wished to find a similar but non-addictive substitute to market. However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as a ""non-addictive morphine substitute,"" heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of addiction among its users. From 1898 through to 1910, diamorphine was marketed under the trademark name Heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant. In the 11th edition of ""Encyclopædia Britannica"" (1910), the article on morphine states: ""In the cough of phthisis minute doses [of morphine] are of service, but in this particular disease morphine is frequently better replaced by codeine"
"by Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Elberfeld, Germany. From 1898 to 1910 heroin was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Because the lethal dose of heroin was viewed as a hundred times greater than its effective dose, heroin was advertised as a safer alternative to other opioids. By 1902, sales made up 5 percent of the company's profits, and ""heroinism"" had attracted media attention. Oxycodone, a thebaine derivative similar to codeine, was introduced by Bayer in 1916 and promoted as a less-addictive analgesic. Preparations of the drug such as oxycodone with paracetamol"
"several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called ""diamorphine (or diacetylmorphine)"", also known as heroin. After Wright's death, Heinrich Dreser, a chemist at Bayer Laboratories, continued to test heroin. Bayer marketed it as an analgesic and 'sedative for coughs' in 1898. When its addictive potential was recognized, Bayer ceased its production in 1913. In 1892, Wright was the first to report the existence of the stoichiometric intermetallic compound AlSb (aluminium antimonide), which is now recognized as a compound semiconductor with potential use in high-frequency, low-power consumption microelectronics applications, as well as gamma radiation detection. In"
"including pneumonia and tuberculosis. Bayer scientists were not the first to make heroin, but the company led the way in commercializing it. ""Heroin"" was a Bayer trademark until after World War I. In 1903 Bayer licensed the patent for the hypnotic drug diethylbarbituric acid from its inventors Emil Fischer and Joseph von Mering. It was marketed under the trade name Veronal as a sleep aid beginning in 1904. Systematic investigations of the effect of structural changes on potency and duration of action at Bayer led to the discovery of phenobarbital in 1911 and the discovery of its potent anti-epileptic activity"
"of Bayer in over 80 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Germany and Switzerland. As of 2011 approximately 40,000 tons of aspirin were produced each year and 10–20 billion tablets consumed in the United States alone for prevention of cardiovascular events. It is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a basic health system. There is an unresolved controversy over the roles played by Bayer scientists in the development of aspirin. Arthur Eichengrün, a Bayer chemist, said he was the first to discover an aspirin formulation that did not have the unpleasant side effects of"
"called acetylation which involved boiling morphine with acetic anhydride for several hours. Heroin received little attention until it was independently synthesized by Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946), working for Heinrich Dreser (1860–1924) at Bayer Laboratories. Dreser brought the new drug to market as an analgesic and a cough treatment for tuberculosis, bronchitis, and asthma in 1898. Bayer ceased production in 1913, after heroin's addictive potential was recognized. Several semi-synthetic opioids were developed in Germany in the 1910s. The first, oxymorphone, was synthesized from thebaine, an opioid alkaloid in opium poppies, in 1914. Next, Martin Freund and Edmund Speyer developed oxycodone, also from"
"products such ""Cafaspirin"" (aspirin with caffeine) and ""Alka-Seltzer"" (a soluble mix of aspirin and bicarbonate of soda) put aspirin to new uses. In 1925, the German Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate of former dye companies; IG Farben's brands of ""Aspirin"" and, in Latin America, the caffeinated ""Cafiaspirina"" (co-managed with Sterling Products) competed with less expensive aspirins such as ""Geniol"". After World War II, with the IG Farben conglomerate dismantled because of its central role in the Nazi regime, Sterling Products bought half of Bayer Ltd, the British Bayer subsidiary—the other half of which it already owned. However,"
"""Bayer Aspirin"" made up only a small fraction of the British aspirin market because of competition from ""Aspro"", ""Disprin"" (a soluble aspirin drug) and other brands. Bayer Ltd began searching for new pain relievers to compete more effectively. After several moderately successful compound drugs that mainly utilized aspirin (""Anadin"" and ""Excedrin""), Bayer Ltd's manager Laurie Spalton ordered an investigation of a substance that scientists at Yale had, in 1946, found to be the metabolically active derivative of acetanilide: acetaminophen. After clinical trials, Bayer Ltd brought acetaminophen to market as ""Panadol"" in 1956. However, Sterling Products did not market ""Panadol"" in"
"""Aspirin"" was Bayer's brand name, rather than the generic name of the drug; however, Bayer's rights to the trademark were lost or sold in many countries. Aspirin's popularity grew over the first half of the twentieth century leading to fierce competition with the proliferation of aspirin brands and products. Aspirin's popularity declined after the development of acetaminophen/paracetamol in 1956 and ibuprofen in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s, John Vane and others discovered the basic mechanism of aspirin's effects, while clinical trials and other studies from the 1960s to the 1980s established aspirin's efficacy as an anti-clotting agent that reduces"
"used during the American Civil War. Opiates soon became known as a wonder drug and were prescribed for a wide array of ailments, even for relatively minor treatments such as cough relief. Bayer began marketing heroin commercially in 1898. Beginning around 1920, however, the addictiveness was recognized, and doctors became reluctant to prescribe opiates. Heroin was made an illegal drug with the Anti-Heroin Act of 1924, in which the U.S. Congress banned the sale, importation, or manufacture of heroin. In the 1950s, heroin addiction was known among jazz musicians, but still fairly uncommon among average Americans, many of whom saw"
"was fueled by revenues from the sale of morphine, an alkaloid found in opium, first identified by a German chemist in the early 19th century and patented by Merck soon afterward. German pharmaceutical companies' work with morphine and its derivatives found particular success in using them as pain relievers and cough suppressants, with Bayer eventually recognizing the potency of heroin, which was legal in Germany at the time (and until the 1950s, before which it was banned only in Asia and the United States). During the era of the German Empire, consolidated in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the"
"ASA with an intentionally convoluted generic name (monoacetic acid ester of salicylic acid) to discourage doctors referring to anything but Aspirin. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Bayer was facing competition in all its major markets from local ASA producers as well as other German drug firms (particularly Heyden and Hoechst). The British market was immediately closed to the German companies, but British manufacturing could not meet the demand—especially with phenol supplies, necessary for ASA synthesis, largely being used for explosives manufacture. On 5 February 1915, Bayer's UK trademarks were voided, so that any company could use"
"strokes. Bayer lost its trademark for Aspirin in the United States in 1918 because it had failed to use the name for its own product and had for years allowed the use of ""Aspirin"" by other manufacturers . Today, aspirin is a generic trademark in many countries. Aspirin, with a capital ""A"", remains a registered trademark of Bayer in Germany, Canada, Mexico, and in over 80 other countries, for acetylsalicylic acid in all markets, but using different packaging and physical aspects for each. Aspirin is sometimes used in veterinary medicine as an anticoagulant or to relieve pain associated with musculoskeletal"
"""acetylsalicylic acid"" (2-acetoxybenzoic acid) is better known as ""aspirin"" in the United States—a generic term. In Canada, however, ""Aspirin"", with an uppercase A, is still a trademark of the German company Bayer, while aspirin, with a lowercase ""a"", is not. Bayer lost the trademark in the United States, the UK and France after World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles. So many copycat products entered the marketplace during the war that it was deemed generic just three years later. Bayer also lost the trademark in the same jurisdictions for ""Heroin"" which it trademarked a year before it"
"By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it around the world. The word ""Aspirin"" was Bayer's brand name, rather than the generic name of the drug; however, Bayer's rights to the trademark were lost or sold in many countries. Aspirin's popularity grew over the first half of the twentieth century leading to fierce competition with the proliferation of aspirin brands and products. Aspirin's popularity declined after the development of acetaminophen/paracetamol in 1956 and ibuprofen in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s, John Vane and others discovered the basic mechanism of aspirin's effects, while clinical trials and"
"has been a subject of controversy, as there have been suggestions that such a disease was in fact a fabrication; the first documented use of the phrase ""soldier's disease"" was in 1915. Diacetylmorphine (better known as heroin) was synthesized from morphine in 1874 and brought to market by Bayer in 1898. Heroin is approximately 1.5 to 2 times more potent than morphine weight for weight. Due to the lipid solubility of diacetylmorphine, it can cross the blood–brain barrier faster than morphine, subsequently increasing the reinforcing component of addiction. Using a variety of subjective and objective measures, one study estimated the"
"any patent the chemists might have taken out for creating it. For many years, however, he attributed Aspirin's discovery solely to Hoffmann. The controversy over who was primarily responsible for aspirin's development spread through much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Although aspirin's origin was in academic research and Bayer was not the first to synthesize it, as of 2016 Bayer still described Hoffman as having ""discovered a pain-relieving, fever-lowering and anti-inflammatory substance."" Historians and others have also challenged Bayer's early accounts of Bayer's synthesis, in which Hoffmann was primarily responsible for the Bayer breakthrough. In 1949, shortly"
"to investigate the substance's efficacy and tolerability had been completed, it was found to be an analgesic, antipyretic and antiinflammatory substance. The company then worked to develop a cost-effective production process that would facilitate the promising active ingredient to be supplied as a pharmaceutical product. In 1899 it was marketed for the first time under the trade name ""Aspirin"", initially as a powder supplied in glass bottles. He also synthesized diamorphine (heroin), previously achieved by Charles Romley Alder Wright. Following the synthesis of aspirin, Hoffmann moved to the pharmaceutical marketing department where he stayed until his retirement in 1928. He"
"current state of the Pharmaceutical Equipment industry. Bayer of Germany, the inventor of aspirin, began trade with China in as early as 1882. Hoechst AG, known as Aventis, sold its products through 128 distribution agents across China in 1887, becoming China's no. 1 Western medicine and dyeing provider. Eli Lilly and Company opened its first overseas representative office in Shanghai in 1918. ICI, the predecessor of the world's no. 3 pharmaceutical enterprise AstraZeneca, began trade with China in 1898. In the 9 months from January to September 2004, the total output of the country's pharmaceutical industry reached $40 billion, 15.8%"
"the records, Hoffmann and Eichengrün held equal positions, and Eichengrün was not Hoffmann's supervisor. Hoffmann was named on the US Patent as the inventor, which Sneader did not mention. Eichengrün, who left Bayer in 1908, had multiple opportunities to claim the priority and had never before 1949 done it; he neither claimed nor received any percentage of the profit from aspirin sales. The name Aspirin was derived from the name of the chemical ASA—""Acetylspirsäure"" in German. ""Spirsäure"" (salicylic acid) was named for the meadowsweet plant, ""Spirea ulmaria"", from which it could be derived. ""Aspirin"" took a- for the acetylation, -spir-"
"Bayer Corporation Bayer Corporation (also known as Bayer USA) is the American subsidiary of Bayer AG. Its main offices are located in Whippany, New Jersey. In addition it has 40 fully consolidated subsidiary companies located in 19 different states. Bayer AG began marketing in the United States soon after the company's inception in Germany. In the late 1800s, they began to sell their trademark medication, aspirin. While the name ""aspirin"" became synonymous with Bayer for over a quarter of a century, the company lost the trademark on the name in the United States during World War I, due to the"
"distributing Aspirin powder for pharmacists to press into pill form to distributing standardized tablets—complete with the distinctive ""Bayer cross"" logo. In 1903 the company set up an American subsidiary, with a converted factory in Rensselaer, New York, to produce Aspirin for the American market without paying import duties. Bayer also sued the most egregious patent violators and smugglers. The company's attempts to hold onto its Aspirin sales incited criticism from muckraking journalists and the American Medical Association, especially after the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that prevented trademarked drugs from being listed in the United States Pharmacopeia; Bayer listed"
"the United States or other countries where ""Bayer Aspirin"" still dominated the aspirin market. Other firms began selling acetaminophen drugs, most significantly, McNeil Laboratories with liquid ""Tylenol"" in 1955, and ""Tylenol"" pills in 1958. By 1967, ""Tylenol"" was available without a prescription. Because it did not cause gastric irritation, acetaminophen rapidly displaced much of aspirin's sales. Another analgesic, anti-inflammatory drug was introduced in 1962: ibuprofen (sold as ""Brufen"" in the U.K. and ""Motrin"" in the U.S.). By the 1970s, aspirin had a relatively small portion of the pain reliever market, and in the 1980s sales decreased even more when ibuprofen"
"the aircraft industry. He contributed to photochemistry by inventing the first process for the production and development of cellulose acetate film, which he patented with Becker. Eichengrün claimed to have directed the initial synthesis of aspirin in 1897, but his claim has been disputed. For many years Bayer credited Felix Hoffmann, Eichengrün's junior, with the invention of aspirin. However, the first attribution of the discovery to Hoffmann appears in 1934, and may have reflected anti-Jewish revisionism. During World War II, Eichengrün was imprisoned in the Concentration camp Theresienstadt. Arthur Eichengrün was born in Aachen as the son of a Jewish"
"Felix Hoffmann Felix Hoffmann (21 January 1868 – 8 February 1946) was a German chemist notable for re-synthesizing diamorphine (independently from C.R. Alder Wright who synthesized it 23 years earlier), which was popularized under the Bayer trade name of ""heroin"". He is also credited with synthesizing aspirin, though whether he did this under his own initiative or under the instruction of Arthur Eichengrün is contested. Felix Hoffmann was born on 21 January 1868 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, the son of an industrialist. In 1889 he started studying chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to study pharmacy and ended it"
"an antibiotic for arthritis vaccine research. In 1941, the US entered World War II, and AHP shipped typical wartime drugs such as sulfa bacteriostatics, blood plasma, typhus vaccine, quinine, and atabrine tablets. Wyeth was later rewarded for its contribution to the war effort. During this time, Wyeth launched its penicillin research facility with G. Raymond Rettew. In 1943, Wyeth purchased ""G. Washington Coffee Refining Company"", an instant coffee company created by George Washington. In 1943, AHP merged with ""Ayerst, McKenna and Harrison, Ltd."" of Canada. With this merger came Premarin, the world's first conjugated estrogen medicine, which was a flagship"
"to allow sale of these holdings, the government auctioned off the Rensselaer plant and all Bayer's American patents and trademarks, including even the Bayer brand name and the Bayer cross logo. It was bought by a patent medicine company, Sterling Products, Inc.. The rights to Bayer Aspirin and the U.S. rights to the Bayer name and trademarks were sold back to Bayer AG in 1994 for US$1 billion. With the coming of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, aspirin—by whatever name—secured a reputation as one of the most powerful and effective drugs in the pharmacopeia of the time. Its"
"In 1897, Felix Hoffmann created a synthetically altered version of salicin, derived from the species, which caused less digestive upset than pure salicylic acid. The new drug, formally acetylsalicylic acid, was named aspirin by Hoffmann's employer Bayer AG after the old botanical name for meadowsweet, ""Spiraea ulmaria"". This gave rise to the class of drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). A natural black dye can be obtained from the roots by using a copper mordant. A tea made from ""Filipendula ulmaria"" flowers or leaves has been used in traditional Austrian herbal medicine for the treatment of rheumatism, gout, infections,"