Now the third largest generics and specialty pharmaceutical company in the world, Mylan
started small; it had only a handful of employees and a single office when it
was founded in West Virginia in 1961 by two U.S. Army buddies: Milan Puskar and
Don Panoz.
Mylan began as a distributor, buying finished goods and reselling them to
pharmacies and physicians, but in 1966 it received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
to manufacture its first medicine, Penicillin G. Three years later, it added another
antibiotic, Tetracycline, to its manufacturing portfolio.
With its manufacturing capabilities growing, Mylan began distributing its own
finished goods to other major pharmaceutical companies, such as Parke-Davis. By
the 1980s, the company's rapid expansion and success as both a distributor and
manufacturer had earned it a place on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1984, the company broke new ground with the introduction of an
anti-hypertensive called Maxzide®, making Mylan the first generic manufacturer
in the world to patent a new drug. It was a harbinger of the company's future
research and development capabilities, which would help it build one of the most robust product
pipelines in the business.
Mylan's geographic presence expanded steadily through the mid-1980s and into
the 1990s, as the company built a national distribution center in North
Carolina, added a manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico and acquired several
companies. Two of the most important were the acquisition of Bertek Inc., an
innovator of transdermal drug systems, known now as Mylan Technologies, and
UDL Laboratories, the largest unit-dose packaged product pharmaceutical company
in the United States.
By 1995, Mylan had created the most dispensed line of pharmaceuticals – branded
or generic – in the U.S. Seven years later, it achieved an important
milestone: for the first time, Mylan's sales exceeded $1 billion.
In 2002, Mylan's current chairman and CEO, Robert J. Coury, joined Mylan and
proceeded to transform it into a global enterprise through two pivotal acquisitions in 2007.
First, Coury acquired a controlling interest in Matrix Laboratories, a Hyderabad, India-based supplier of active
pharmaceutical ingredients. As a result, the company's footprint expanded to
include India, Europe, China and South Africa. Coury then won a bidding war for the generics business of Germany-based
Merck KGaA. With that acquisition, the
company achieved a global scale and reach matched by only a few other firms.
Mylan now serves customers in more than 140 countries and territories.
Today's Mylan is an industry leader, with a portfolio of more than 900 individual products
and a team of approximately 15,000 employees. Certainly, it's a
far different company than it was in 1961, but the simple principle on which it
was founded remains to this day the driving force behind its continuing
success. That principle: Mylan brings high quality, affordable medicines to
people who need them. It has served Mylan, its customers and its shareholders
well for nearly 50 years, and it will continue to do so for many years to come.