Wikipedia
Jenapharm is a pharmaceutical company from Jena, Germany. Founded in 1950 in East Germany, the company focused from the beginning on the production and development of steroids. Due to the economic circumstances of the Eastern Bloc, the company initially used a unique process of steroid synthesis starting from hog bile, however this method was abandoned a decade later in favor of total synthesis. Initially the company produced a wide range of generic steroids, including corticosteroids, but later on it focused on anabolic steroids, estrogens and progestins.
Prior to Germany's reunification Jenapharm was the only supplier of hormonal contraceptives in East Germany. It successfully marketed a number of drugs it had developed in collaboration with other East German chemists. Perhaps the most well known of these is Valette, which sold well in Germany in the 1990s. After the reunification, Jenapharm eventually became a subsidiary of Schering AG, which sold its generic therapeutics businesses to Dermapharm AG in 2004, and a year later restructured the marketing and distribution of Jenapharm into an independent subsidiary while integrating the research and development branch with its own laboratories.
East Germany had been running a state-sponsored mass doping program for its athletes with anabolic steroids, mostly with Oral Turinabol, a product that Jenapharm had developed. In 2005 the company was sued or threatened with lawsuits by hundreds of athletes who were forced to take these drugs. The company settled the lawsuits by contributing to the creation of a $4.1 million fund that compensated former athletes.