Laboratoires Servier

Servier Laboratories (French: Laboratoires Servier, often abbreviated to Servier) is an international pharmaceutical company founded by Jacques Servier and now governed by a non-profit foundation, with its headquarters in France (Suresnes). The consolidated turnover for the 2018 financial year was €4.2 billion. Servier is the leading French independent pharmaceutical company, and the second largest French pharmaceutical company. It has branches in 149 countries, achieving 82% of its sales outside France. The company reportedly invests a little under 25% of its turnover in research and development, which occupies 3,000 of its 22,000 employees worldwide. The company's production sites produced 853 million drug boxes in 2013. The Servier Clinical Support Unit in Gidy (near Orléans), which produces drugs for clinical trials, is the largest unit of its kind in Europe. Servier Laboratories is a full member of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). In 2018, Servier finalized the acquisition of Shire's oncology branch in Boston and named David K. Lee as CEO. The official opening of Servier's new U.S. headquarters took place in 2019. In 2009, Mediator, an amphetamine-based Servier drug originally developed for weight loss in people with diabetes but often prescribed off-label as a dieting aid, was withdrawn from the market after being linked to 500–2000 deaths in France. Further investigations found that many previous safety alerts on that drug had been either missed or covered up, possibly due to the improper influence of the well-connected company. On March 29, 2021, a French court fined Servier €2.7m (£2.3m) after finding it guilty of deception and manslaughter, with Mediator linked to the deaths of up to 2,000 people. The former executive Jean-Philippe Seta was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of four years, while the elderly Jacques Servier had died in 2014 and therefore could not be judged....