Burroughs Wellcome

Pharmaceutical company founded in London in 1880 by the American pharmacists Silas Burroughs and Henry Wellcome, whose American arm at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina became well known in its own right. Introduced the compressed tablet to Britain, built the Wellcome research laboratories whose scientists won Nobel prizes for work on nucleoside analogues, and produced medicines including aciclovir, zidovudine and allopurinol before the business passed to Glaxo and then to GlaxoSmithKline, while the Wellcome Trust remains as its charitable legacy.