Leaving licensed-in drugs behind: a new laboratory for original discovery (1962)

A manager able to disown his own company's past

“Nor was the Shionogi of the past by any means an exception to this” — the sentence Shiono Kotaro placed in his 1962 address is the strongest part of this decision. He called copying and undercutting the normal practice of the industry, admitted in front of his own staff that his company had been one of its practitioners, and then declared that it was leaving. For a choice that meant halting the pursuit of sales in order to build a laboratory, the workforce first had to hear someone name which parts of the business had been borrowed. It seems likely that the argument against expansion carried only because the penicillin failure and the idling of four plants were already behind them.

The fruit, though, was a long time coming. After Sinomin in 1958, no major drug of Shionogi's own creation appeared until Shiomarin at the end of 1981, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun wrote that the company was spending more than ¥10bn a year without being blessed with a promising new drug. That Shiomarin then left half of sales concentrated in antibiotics is part of the same record: standing on original discovery was not a smooth road. Even so, without the 1960 contract that moved Shionogi from the receiving side of technology to the giving side, the later idea of sending a self-discovered drug around the world on royalties would have been hard to conceive.