Jenapharm is a pharmaceutical company from Jena, Germany. Founded in 1950 in East Germany, the company focused from the beginning on the production and development of steroids. Due to the economic circumstances of the Eastern Bloc, the company initially used a unique process of steroid synthesis starting from hog bile, however this method was abandoned a decade later in favor of total synthesis. Initially the company produced a wide range of generic steroids, including corticosteroids, but later on it focused on anabolic steroids, estrogens and progestins.
Prior to Germany's reunification Jenapharm was the only supplier of hormonal contraceptives in East Germany. It successfully marketed a number of drugs it had developed in collaboration with other East German chemists. Perhaps the most well known of these is Valette, which sold well in Germany in the 1990s. After the reunification, Jenapharm eventually became a subsidiary of Schering AG, which sold its generic therapeutics businesses to Dermapharm AG in 2004, and a year later restructured the marketing and distribution of Jenapharm into an independent subsidiary while integrating the research and development branch with its own laboratories.
East Germany had been running a state-sponsored mass doping program for its athletes with anabolic steroids, mostly with Oral Turinabol, a product that Jenapharm had developed. In 2005, the company was sued or threatened with lawsuits by hundreds of athletes who were forced to take these drugs. The company settled the lawsuits by contributing to the creation of a $4.1 million fund that compensated former athletes.
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.
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.
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.
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.