Humble Beginnings
 One year after his arrival in New York from Germany in 1848, Charles Pfizer, a chemist, and his cousin Charles Erhart, a confectioner, founded a company in Brooklyn. The Chas. Pfizer and Company Inc. was a manufacturer of chemicals, including tartar, borax and refined camphor. Pfizer’s first medicinal product was  santonin, a preparation designed to combat parasitic worms. In 1868, the company moved to larger premises on Maiden Lane in the Wall Street area of Manhattan.
By the turn of the century, Pfizer’s main product was citric acid. This versatile substance had many industrial applications. It was also widely used to flavour foods, soft drinks and medicines. It wasn’t until 1917; however, that citric acid was made for the first time by fermenting sugar. Through the 1920s, Pfizer developed new methods of high-volume fermentation. In the 1930s, Pfizer developed deep-tank fermentation of citric acid from molasses, a method that increased quality while cutting production costs.
The wonder drug
 With the coming of the Second World War, there was an urgency to develop an infection-fighting medicine. One such medicine was penicillin, which had been discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in London in 1928. But penicillin remained a laboratory curiosity as it couldn’t be made in meaningful quantities.
Several U.S. companies were enlisted to solve the problem and, in 1942, the year that Pfizer first went public, the company used its expertise in fermentation to become the first to produce penicillin in large volumes. The wonder drug was soon available to treat Allied troops after the D-Day invasion, and the world entered the age of modern medicine.
By 1945, Pfizer was the world’s largest producer of penicillin and set out to discover other organisms to fight disease. In 1959, following 20 million tests on 135,000 soil samples from different locations around the world, Pfizer introduced the new antibiotic Terramycin, the first medicine discovered by systematic Pfizer research.
Global expansion
Pfizer first came to the Indian market in 1950, through a company named Dumex Limited. The first production facility was set up at Darukhanna in Mumbai, where products like Protinex and Isonex (isoniazid - an anti -TB drug) were manufactured. Subsequently, this plant also produced Becosules and Corex, both of which remain mega products till date. Two other manufacturing sites, which were established during the eighties, one for organic synthesis in West Bengal and the other for formulations in Gujarat, were both shut down.
In 1960, Pfizer established a large and modern plant at Thane, near Mumbai, which housed manufacturing, quality control and product research facilities. This plant has won a number of national safety awards.
Recently, the Thane plant has undergone an upgradation of its facilities to align with Pfizer global manufacturing standards.
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