Serono

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Serono was a biotechnology company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It was acquired by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 2006. The company was founded as the Serono Pharmacological Institute by Cesare Serono in 1906 in Rome, Italy. Serono was incorporated in 1987 and the holding company, Ares-Serono S.A., changed its name to Serono S.A. in May 2000, the same year that its CEO, Ernesto Bertarelli, led a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Serono developed and marketed pharmaceuticals in the fields of reproductive health, multiple sclerosis, growth & metabolism and dermatology. A key step in its development was the discovery of a method of extracting urinary gonadotropins by Dr. Piero Donini. A decade after his discovery, a partnership with Professor Bruno Lunenfeld led to gonadotropins being able to become a widely available and commercially successful treatment for infertility, marketed by the company as Pergonal. Serono obtained the biological material for the gonoadtropin extraction from the urine of Italian nuns, thanks to the connections of one of its board members, Giulio Pacelli, who was the nephew of Pope Pius XII. In the 1980s, the company moved from natural extraction into biotechnology, a process begun by its CEO Fabio Bertarelli and accelerated by his son, Ernesto Bertarelli. Its eight biotechnology products were available in four core therapeutic areas: neurology for the treatment of relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis; reproductive health for treatments of infertility (with the recombinant version of Pergonal marketed as Gonal-f); dermatology, where Serono launched biologics in Europe for moderate-to-severe psoriasis, and growth and metabolism for treatments for HIV-associated wasting and growth deficiencies. A particular commercial success was its drug, REBIF, used to treat Multiple Scleroris. Introduced in 1998 to treat relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the degenerative disease. By 1999 it had generated $143 million in...