Company history

Ono began in 1717 when Ono Ichibei set up in Osaka’s Doshomachi as a broker in medicinal goods, trading under the shop name Fushimiya Ichibei. Doshomachi was the licensed drug quarter of Tokugawa Japan — the street through which imported Chinese materia medica and domestic herbs reached the rest of the country — and for more than two centuries the Ono house was one of its established wholesalers. It bought, graded and distributed medicine; it did not make it.

The move toward manufacturing came slowly and from the edges. A chemical venture, Toyo Seiyaku Kasei, was set up in 1918; in 1934 the family shop was reorganized as an unlimited partnership, Ono Ichibei Shoten, with capital of ¥160,000 — the first modern corporate form in a business that had run on family standing alone. Then, in 1947, the shop spun out two small companies: Nihon Yuki Kako (capital ¥195,000) to manufacture drugs, and Nihon Rikagaku Kogyo to make the glass ampoules they would be packed in.

In 1948 the manufacturing arm was renamed Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., moved to the plant in Higashinari-ku that became the Joto works, and absorbed the glassmaker’s site as a packaging plant. The same year it achieved Japan’s first industrial synthesis of ephedrine. A wholesaler that had spent 231 years choosing other people’s medicines now had one of its own.

In 1949 the parent swallowed itself. Ono Ichibei Shoten — the house that had carried the founder’s name since 1717 — was merged into the two-year-old manufacturing company, not the other way round, collapsing making and selling into a single line. Senior managing director Ono Yuzo had concluded that survival in the postwar drug market lay only in manufacturing, and once that was settled there was no reason to keep the capital or the signboard on the trading side.

What followed was not immediate originality. Through the 1950s the company lived on over-the-counter remedies pushed by radio advertising on Asahi Broadcasting programmes — respectable business, but the business of a brand, not of a discoverer. The Joto integrated formulation plant opened in 1961, and in 1962 the shares were listed on the second section of the Osaka exchange, followed by Tokyo in 1963 and both first sections in 1969: 245 years after its founding, the drug house had become a public company.

The company that had sold other people’s medicine for two centuries became a discoverer in 1968, when it opened its Central Research Institute and, in the same year, completed the total chemical synthesis of prostaglandins — physiologically active compounds then at the frontier of international pharmacology. It was the first result that placed Ono’s own laboratories at world level, and it set the pattern of the next four decades: a mid-sized firm competing not on sales force but on a narrow, deep line of chemistry.

Capacity followed research. The Fujiyama works expanded through 1975, 1980, 1982 and 1991; safety research opened at Fukui in 1985, the Minase institute (successor to the Central Research Institute) gained new laboratory buildings in 1987 and 1996, a synthesis laboratory was added at Fukui in 1994, and a research institute at Tsukuba in 2002. In 1998 Ono Pharma USA and Ono Pharma UK gave the company its first subsidiaries abroad.

The decisive science arrived from outside the building. Honjo Tasuku of Kyoto University identified the PD-1 molecule in 1992, and in 2002 the university and Ono filed jointly for its use in immunotherapy. Ono had neither an oncology franchise nor antibody technology; thirteen Japanese companies declined to develop the compound, and it was only by finding Medarex in the United States in 2005 that the programme moved at all. When Bristol-Myers Squibb bought Medarex in 2009, the counterpart Ono needed had become one of the largest oncology companies in the world.

In 2011, under president Sagara Gyo, Ono granted Bristol-Myers Squibb the rights to the anti-PD-1 antibody outside its own territories in exchange for joint development. Three years later it launched Opdivo, the world’s first anti-PD-1 antibody and the drug that made cancer immunotherapy a category. Sales passed ¥100 billion a year, royalties from BMS became a pillar of profit, and a company that had listed on the second section of the Osaka exchange was suddenly funding research at global scale.

It was also a lopsided success. Most of the money Opdivo earned abroad accrued to the partner and returned as royalties; the compensation owed to Honjo for the discovery became a public dispute; and the patents run out in 2031. Ono spent the following decade trying to build things it owned outright — subsidiaries in Korea (2013) and Taiwan (2014), venture investment in the United States from 2020, and digital-health and patient-support ventures from 2021 — while moving to the Prime market in April 2022.

The largest answer came in 2024, when Ono paid about $2.4 billion ($25.60 a share) for the US biotech Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, taking in the GIST drug QINLOCK, the candidate vimseltinib, and — the real object — a commercial organization of its own in the United States and Europe. The bill landed at once: for the year ended March 2025 revenue was $3.3B (¥487bn) and operating profit $398.9M (¥60bn), down from $1.1B (¥160bn) a year earlier as goodwill amortization and deal costs bit. In June 2024 Sagara moved up to chairman and CEO and Takino Toichi became president and COO, inheriting the question the purchase was meant to settle.