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  • Title: [Early achievements of the Danish pharmaceutical industry-7].
    Author: Grevsen JV, Kirkegaard H, Kruse E, Kruse PR.
    Journal: Theriaca; 2014; (42):31-62. PubMed ID: 25816561.
    Abstract:
    A/S GEA Farmaceutisk Fabrik was established as a family business in 1927 by the pharmacist Knud L. Gad Andresen who until then had been employed in the pharmaceutical industry. Gad Andresen wanted to run a company focusing on the development of generics, and he wanted this development to take place in a close cooperation with Danish physicians. This has indeed been achieved with success. In 1995 GEA was purchase'd by the American pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb who in a press release characterized GEA as Denmark's second largest manufacturer of generics. Immediately after this takeover GEA's R&D department ceased the research in innovative products and from now on exclusively focused on the development of generics. Three years later GEA was sold to the German generic company Hexal who later on resold GEA to the Swiss generic company Sandoz. GEA changed ownership another couple of times until the last owner went bankrupt in 2011. GEA is yet again a model example of an early Danish pharmaceutical company which was established as an individual company, and which had a long commercial success with the production and marketing of generics. GEA's earliest products, the organotherapeutics, were not innovations. The innovative products were developed already in the 1890s in Denmark by Alfred Benzon, and later on copies followed a.o. from Medicinalco and from foreign companies before GEA marketed their generics. Therefore GEA had to promote their preparations as especially qualified medicinal products and to intimate that the products of the competitors were less "active'". At the end of the 1920s the Ministry of Health became aware of the fact that there might be health problems related to the none-existing control of both the or- ganotherapeutic preparations and actually also the other medicinal products of the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore the Ministry had requested the National Board of Health for a statement regarding this problem. The National Board of Health was, however, at that time of the opinion that there were no serious problems with organotherapeutics from those companies marketing such products. It requires studies in the unprinted journals of the Ministry of Health and the National Board of Health to find the background for and the causes of the request from the Ministry at this point concerning the control of the organotherapeutic products of the pharmaceutical industry. Neither were GEA's barbiturates innovative products. The "Gad Andresen Case" is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it illustrates that the development of generics at this stage could not always take place exclusively in a pharmaceutical-chemical laboratory, but also required a certain minimum of clinical trials including human beings. Secondly, it shows that the industrial products had now slowly, but surely gained market shares and displaced the pharmacy-produced medicinal products to such an extent that it did not only worry the pharmacy owners and their trade orga- nization. Now this concern had also resulted in a counteract so that the pharmacies in the manufacture of their products had to copy the industrial products, however, in certain cases with a dubious result. Gealgica tablets and especially their content of fenacetine is not only a model example of how the opinion of the positive and negative properties of a medicinal product changes over time. It also shows how long time could pass before the health authorities took measures against a substance with problematic side effects in spite of the fact that less damaging substances had been available for a long time, in this case paracetamol. Medicinal products containing fenacetine were on the market for almost 100 years. On the contrary meprobamat is a model example of a drug substance where the opinion of its positive and negative properties changed essentially over a relatively short period. In spite of this it remained on the market for a little less than 40 years. Restenil and Trihistan are mentioned on Knud & Dagny Gad Andresen's homepage (in 2014) as new medicinal products developed by GEA. This is not quite correct. Both drug substances in these preparations had been developed in the USA. In Denmark GEA had the possibility to market these substances under GEA's own brand names along with corresponding foreign brand names. It can be concluded that GEA's own research on the whole was confined to the development of own patentable syntheses of already known drug substances. During the later marketing of generics GEA appealed to the national feeling of the Danish population in the same way as a.o. Pharmacia did in the 1920s. From the very start GEA specialized in the manufacture of generics, and GEA was able to follow this way with commercial success--as a Danish alternative--for almost 90 years.
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