Founded in Geneva in 1937, OM Pharma has spent most of a century on bacterial extracts meant to modulate immunity and to prevent respiratory and urinary infection. The products are still made in Geneva and sent to more than a hundred countries. Some four hundred people work there — most at the global headquarters and biotech centre, a smaller commercial house in Fribourg.
Prevention as a research subject
The twentieth-year note was written in a period when infection had been returned to the centre of public language. OM Pharma’s answer was not a new molecular entity every season. It was to reread lysates the company already knew how to make, and to put more than CHF 250 million into R&D and manufacturing on the lake, with profits held back for that work through 2027.
Visitors, they said, are struck by the industrial rooms — cell culture through to the finished pack. We keep the page because a house that still makes what it names, in the city where it was founded, is the kind of neighbour a formulation bench can understand.