Merck Frosst Canada Inc. is Canada’s largest fully-integrated pharmaceutical company. Its more than eleven hundred employees are engaged in the discovery, development, manufacture, marketing and sales of prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical products.  Most corporate activity takes place at the company’s Kirkland, Quebec, headquarters, just outside Montreal. Regional offices are based in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City and Halifax.

Merck Frosst’s roots in Canada stretch back nearly a century. The chemist Charles Frosst and four associates, including William S. Ayerst and Frank W. Horner, founded Charles E. Frosst & Co. in Montreal in 1899. the famous numbered analgesics such as 217^® and 222^® were the company’s first products . By the mid-twenties, the company was entirely family-owned. That same decade, Frosst became the first producer of synthetic vitamin D in Canada. The company’s reputation as a leader in research was bolstered in the mid-1940s when Frosst pioneered the field of nuclear medicine with the development and commercialization of the first radioactive pharmaceutical products for sale in Canada and abroad.

In 1965 Charles E. Frosst & Co. joined Merck & Co., Inc. of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, whose history began with a German pharmacy acquired in 1668 by Friedrich Jacob Merck. The Merck family founded the American firm in 1891 and established a branch in Montreal in 1911. Towards the end of World War II, Merck & Co. Ltd. was producing penicillin in the first deep fermentation unit to be operated in the Commonwealth.

Merck continued to grow rapidly in the post-war period, merging with Sharp & Dohme in 1953 and then with Charles E. Frosst & Co. in 1965. In the late sixties, a Merck Frosst team in Montreal scored a pharmaceutical first with the discovery of timolol maleate, marked as BLOCADREN^® (for the treatment of high blood pressure) and TIMOPTIC^® (for glaucoma).
 

Merk Frosst Facility in Kirkland Quebec.

The Merck Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research is the largest biomedical research facility in the country and employs more than 150 world class scientists. Since 1976 Merck Frosst researchers have been the lead team in the world in leukotriene research, naturally occurring substances implicated in respiratory diseases. Merck Frosst scientists are developing compounds that may one day represent breakthrough therapies for the treatment of asthma and other respiratory conditions.

Merck Frosst is also active in the communities it serves, particularly in the area of supporting and promoting science and science education. The company hosts dozens of field trips for students, has developed a program which sees Merck Frosst scientists visit local high schools to talk about the research they do, and is engaged in an ambitious nation-wide co-op student program. In addition to numerous other scholarships, research grants and university faculty sabbaticals, Merck Frosst also provides scholarships to pharmacy and medicine students across the country, research fellowships to medical and pharmacy schools and is a corporate sponsor of the Federal Government’s Canada Scholarships Program.

As the pre-eminent pharmaceutical company in Canada and as part of the world’s leading pharmaceutical company, Merck & Co., Inc., the Merck Frosst name stands for superior research for superior products and for a highly desirable working environment.