The Upjohn Company was an American pharmaceutical manufacturing firm (est. 1886) in Hastings, Michigan, by Dr. William E. Upjohn, an 1875 graduate of the University of Michigan medical school. The company was originally formed to make friable pills, specifically designed to crush easily, and thus be easier for patients to digest. Upjohn initially marketed the pills to doctors by sending them a wooden plank along with a rival’s pill and one of Upjohn’s, with instructions to try to hammer the pills into the plank.[1]
History
Upjohn developed a process for the large scale production of cortisone. The oxygen atom group must be in position 11 for this steroid to function. There are, however, no known natural starting materials with an oxo-group in position 11. The only method for preparing cortisone prior to 1952 was a lengthy synthesis, starting from cholic acid isolated from bile. In 1952, two Upjohn biochemists, Dury Peterson and Herb Murray, announced that they had invented a new method by fermenting the steroid progesterone with a common mold of the genus Rhizopus. Over the next several years, a group of chemists headed by John Hogg developed a process for preparing cortisone from the soybean sterol stigmasterol. The microbiological oxygenation invented by Peterson and Murry is a key step in this process.[2]