From The 1970s To Today
From the 1970s onwards, Sigma-Tau focused on experimenting with new medicines for rare diseases – a commitment that in 1984 would cause it to become the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world and assignee in the United States of an Orphan Drug Designation, subsequently receiving another seven. With the discovery in the 1970s of carnitine deficiency syndrome, an illness with a fatal outcome, Sigma-Tau focused the investigative efforts of its laboratories on research into a molecule capable of opposing the disease. This was to bring about the creation of L-carnitine, one of the few Italian pharmaceutical products widely received outside Italy, and which was recognized by the United States in 1984 for its value as a life saving medicine. The chemical and biologic pharmacology study of carnitine, a substance of natural origin, enabled greater understanding of its efficacy in correcting the biochemical and metabolic defects at the base of numerous other pathologies.
Fondazione Sigma-Tau was created in 1986 as a charitable organization with the aim of developing research, promoting scientific and cultural progress and the safeguarding of the results of scientific investigation.
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