Pfizer Inc.

Charles Pfizer and his cousin Charles Erhart emigrated from Germany to New York in the 1840s and founded a fine chemicals business in Brooklyn in 1849 with $2,500 borrowed from Pfizer's father. Their first product was santonin — an antiparasitic compound used to treat intestinal worms, which were endemic among American children in the nineteenth century. They mixed it with almond-toffee flavouring to make it palatable. The product was a commercial success, establishing Pfizer as a specialty chemicals company.

During World War II, the U.S. government selected Pfizer to scale up penicillin production for Allied forces. Pfizer's fermentation expertise — developed over decades of making citric acid — proved crucial. The company developed a deep-tank fermentation process that dramatically increased penicillin yield. By June 1944, Pfizer was producing half of all penicillin made in the United States for the D-Day invasion. The wartime relationship with the U.S. government established Pfizer as a major pharmaceutical manufacturer and funded its transition from chemicals to drugs.

Pfizer launched Terramycin — an antibiotic discovered in Pfizer's own research laboratories — in 1950. It was the first drug discovered and developed entirely by Pfizer, rather than licensed from another company. Terramycin's commercial success demonstrated that pharmaceutical R&D could generate returns that justified investment. Pfizer invested its Terramycin profits into research, establishing the model that would eventually produce Zoloft, Lipitor, Viagra, and dozens of other blockbuster drugs.

Pfizer's researchers were conducting clinical trials on sildenafil — a drug intended to treat angina and hypertension — when trial participants reported an unexpected side effect. Male participants were reluctant to return unused pills at the end of the trial. Pfizer pivoted the drug's development toward erectile dysfunction and launched Viagra in 1998. It was the first oral treatment for erectile dysfunction and generated $1 billion in its first year — the fastest pharmaceutical launch in history at the time. Pfizer's share price doubled.

Pfizer partnered with German biotechnology company BioNTech in 2020 to develop an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. The partnership moved at unprecedented speed: the vaccine was authorised for emergency use in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2020 — less than a year after the virus was first identified. Pfizer's COVID vaccine generated $36.8 billion in revenue in 2021 alone — the highest annual revenue from a single drug in pharmaceutical history. The mRNA technology used in the vaccine, previously unproven at scale, opened a new era in vaccine development.