Bristol Myers Squibb: A Burned Brooklyn Lab, Channel Stuffing and Opdivo

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On Christmas Eve 1858, former Navy surgeon Edward Robinson Squibb watched his new Brooklyn laboratory burn, and local doctors raised $2,100 to rebuild it. Obsessed with purity, Squibb published his own standards manual when the American Medical Association moved slowly, and supplied the Union Army with morphine, anesthetics and quinine. In 1887, Hamilton College graduates William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers bought a struggling firm in Clinton, New York, and sold Sal Hepatica laxative and Ipana toothpaste. World War II made them penicillin rivals: Bristol-Myers converted an acidophilus milk plant in East Syracuse in 1943, and Squibb opened the world's largest penicillin plant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1944.

The companies merged in 1989, and in 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Bristol-Myers Squibb the National Medal of Technology. Then came a 2002 channel stuffing scandal, restated results for 1999 to 2001 and a $150 million settlement, plus $670 million to settle state antitrust suits over Taxol and BuSpar. In July 2006, while under a federal monitor, the company's offices were raided by the FBI over the Plavix dispute, and CEO Peter Dolan stepped down. BMS then sold consumer brands like Excedrin and spun off Mead Johnson to fund acquisitions, including Medarex in 2009 and Celgene for $74 billion in 2019.

• Wellington Management and Starboard Value opposed the Celgene deal, but 75 percent of shareholders approved it.
• Opdivo, a PD-1 inhibitor, blocks the signal cancer cells use to hide from T cells.
• BMS bought Karuna Therapeutics for $14 billion in March 2024, and its schizophrenia drug Cobenfy won FDA approval that September.
• Cobenfy targets M1 and M4 muscarinic receptors instead of dopamine, the first new type of schizophrenia treatment in 70 years.
• In 2025, Eliquis made up 30 percent of global revenue and Opdivo another 21 percent.