Pharmacia AB — commonly "Pharmacia" — is a Swedish pharmaceutical/biotech entity founded in 1911 in Stockholm and based from 1951 in Uppsala, Sweden. It grew through mergers: with KabiVitrum in the late 1980s (Kabi Pharmacia), with U.S.-based Upjohn in 1995 (Pharmacia & Upjohn, HQ moved to London), and with Monsanto in 1999, producing U.S.-headquartered Pharmacia Corporation. Pharmacia Corporation was acquired by Pfizer in a stock deal announced July 2002 and closed April 2003 (valued around $60 billion); the Pharmacia name was retired and its units were progressively sold or folded into Pfizer. Pharmacia AB therefore is not an independent public company today — ownership sits within the Pfizer group, and much of the legacy Swedish operation (diagnostics → Phadia, later Thermo Fisher; biotech → GE Healthcare; eye-surgery products → Advanced Medical Optics) has been divested. Public size figures for the pre-acquisition group (circa 2000: ~$18 billion sales, ~59,000 employees) come from secondary academic sources and could not be confirmed against a primary filing here.
Operations. Pharmacia was an operating pharmaceutical company, not a licensor shell. Its portfolio spanned prescription drugs and consumer/device lines, including the glaucoma drug Xalatan (latanoprost), the anti-inflammatory Celebrex (celecoxib, co-marketed with Pfizer), Camptosar (cancer), Detrol (overactive bladder), Genotropin (growth hormone), Fragmin (anticoagulant), Nicorette, the eye-surgery aid Healon, and allergy diagnostics.
Litigation posture. The single tracked case lists Pharmacia AB as plaintiff (1) and never as defendant (0) — the classic profile of an operating company enforcing its own patents, not an NPE asserting acquired rights. The suit was a Hatch-Waxman/ANDA dispute filed in the District of New Jersey in December 2001, not an Eastern District of Texas NPE-style filing.
Notable case. Pharmacia Corporation et al. v. Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. (D.N.J., 2001) concerned Xalatan. On appeal, the Federal Circuit (417 F.3d 1369, Aug. 10, 2005) affirmed that U.S. Patent 5,422,368 was unenforceable for inequitable conduct but held that a terminal disclaimer did not carry that finding to the related '504 patent.