Eisai

Eisai is a pharmaceutical corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with more than 10,000 employees. As of 2012, Eisai was the fifth-largest Japanese pharmaceutical company and the 25th-largest corporation in the world in terms of global sales.

Eisai is uniquely characteristic in that it is a corporation with a wide range of pharmaceuticals and health care products (except veterinary medicine) in its portfolio, and also in that a majority of its products are sold overseas. Regarding prescription drugs, one main product for a number of years was the drug Aricept (donepezil), which was used for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1996 and subsequently launched in tablet form. It was developed within the corporation but was ...