Pharmacia & Upjohn Company (commonly Pharmacia & Upjohn, later shortened to Pharmacia) was a pharmaceutical company formed in 1995 through the merger of Sweden's Pharmacia AB (est. 1911) and The Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo, Michigan (est. 1886). It initially located its headquarters in London, then moved its global base to New Jersey in 1998 under CEO Fred Hassan. The company was publicly traded and, per contemporaneous reporting, employed roughly 35,000 people around the time of the merger. In April 2000 it merged with Monsanto and G.D. Searle to form Pharmacia Corporation; Pharmacia spun off Monsanto's agricultural business in 2002 and was acquired by Pfizer Inc. in April 2003. The Pharmacia & Upjohn name therefore no longer identifies an independent operating entity.
Products and operations. Pharmacia & Upjohn was a research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer selling human-health medicines, animal-health products, diagnostics and specialty products. Notable franchises included ophthalmology (Xalatan/latanoprost for glaucoma), central-nervous-system drugs inherited from Upjohn (Xanax, Halcion, Motrin) and oncology and arthritis therapies. It was an operating company with in-house R&D and manufacturing, not a licensing shell.
Litigation posture. The tracked data show one case, in which the company is a plaintiff (1 as plaintiff, 0 as defendant) — consistent with an operating drug maker asserting its own Orange Book patents against a generic challenger under the Hatch-Waxman framework, not with a non-practicing entity acquiring patents to assert. The single matter is an ANDA dispute in the District of New Jersey, whose appeals route to the Federal Circuit; it does not cluster in plaintiff-friendly venues such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case. Pharmacia Corporation et al. v. Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. (D.N.J., filed Dec. 21, 2001; Fed. Cir. 417 F.3d 1369 (2005)) concerned latanoprost formulations. The district court upheld U.S. Patent 5,296,504 as valid, infringed and enforceable, but held U.S. Patent 5,422,368 unenforceable for inequitable conduct; the Federal Circuit affirmed both rulings in 2005.