History
During the occupation of Germany at the end of World War II, all pharmaceutical companies from Nazi Germany were located in the Western-occupied areas. Jena, which fell in the Soviet-controlled area, had an Institute for Microbiology — the Schott-Zeiss Institute — that had the prerequisites for small scale pharmaceutical production. Although the institute had been founded in 1944, with just 9 employees, Hans Knöll produced there the first batch of penicillin made in Germany, right before the end of the war. In 1948, the institute was producing 10 billion IUs of penicillin per month.[6]
In the late 1940s, rickets was rampant amongst the children in the Soviet-occupied zone. In 1949, Alfred Schubert, who first developed a method of synthesis of vitamin D2 at the Friedrich-Schiller University, set up and industrial process that produced about 10 kg/year of Vitamin D2. (Vitamin D2 was superseded by vitamin D3 10 years later). In the same year the institute was tasked to synthesize steroid hormones, in particular cortisone. At the end of 1949, it received official permission to manufacture and market pharmaceuticals, and the public company VEB Jenapharm was founded on January 1, 1950. At the time the company already had about 600 employees.[6]
Diosgenin and hecogenin, which were commonly used in the West as precursors for steroid synthesis, were not available in East Germany, and for political and economic reasons, these substances could not be imported. Jenapharm developed an alternate process starting from hyodesoxycholic acid extracted from hog bile, from which they first produced pregnenolone, and subsequently progesterone and desoxycorticosterone acetate in 1954/1955. In that decade research and production continued to be closely intertwined at Jenapharm. Alfred Schubert was both Research Director and manager of the plant that produced steroids.[6]
Between 1957 and 1962, Gerhard Langbein further expanded the gamut of steroids that Jenapharm produced using its unique process to include testosterone, 4-chlorotestosterone, cortexolone, cortisone, cortisol and prednisone. Chlormadinone acetate was the first oral contraceptive produced by Jenapharm. It was sold under the name Ovosiston starting in 1964, and was also produced from hog bile.[6]
In the 1960s, East German scientists tried to find an alternative to hog bile as the precursor for steroid synthesis by cultivating Solanum auriculatum, but these efforts failed to achieve industrial scale. Attempts to use sugar cane wax from Cuba or cholesterol from animal spinal cords also proved uneconomical. To remain competitive on the steroids market Jenapharm moved towards total synthesis. They used Igor Torgov's synthesis scheme, which was not patented in the GDR, and ironically was ignored by other Soviet chemists. Initially Jenapharm managed to produce only 25–75 kg of entirely synthetic steroids annually, but after tuning the process through more than 100 patented improvements, production reached about 5 tons per year in the 1980s. The move to total synthesis forced however Jenepharm to abandon the corticosteroids market.[6]
At the end of 1980s, Jenapharm had sales of around DM200m ($112m) and 1700 employees, and was amongst eastern Germany's three largest pharmaceuticals producers with production plants at Jena, Erfurt, Naumburg and Magdeburg. It produced a wide range of products, but 50% of sales were in hormone products.[7] In 1991, Jenapharm was privatized and sold to Gehe AG, a subsidiary of Franz Haniel & Cie GmbH, after an initial bid by Schering AG failed,[8] but by October 2001, Schering had acquired 100% ownership of Jenapharm stock.[9]
