Napp has been in existence for more than half a century. We owe our name to a Swiss chemist, Hermann Richard Napp, who, together with a solicitor, Ernest Alfred Clifford, registered the company in the UK in 1923.

The current owners acquired the company in 1966. Their philosphy was simple: to improve health and quality of life for people everywhere by developing an ever-expanding range of medicines.

In the mid-1970s, the Purdue/Mundipharma/Napp associated companies were among the first to develop prolonged release technology, which has revolutionised the treatment of chronic pain. Our development of prolonged release morphine sulphate tablets (MST^® Continus^® tablets) was a world first that set us on the path of taking existing, effective medicines and putting them into innovative delivery mechanisms to improve their offering to patients and healthcare professionals. 

In the 1980s, we moved to the Cambridge Science Park, opening our striking glass and dolomite aggregate UK headquarters building in 1983.The building is affectionately referred to as the "toast rack" and has become something of an iconic image that is often used to represent the Science Park.

In the 1990s, our success led to us eventually occupying three other sites on the Science Park as we continued to offer innovative products to patients, including the first bi-phasic delivery mechanism for an opioid analgesic. We also branched out into new fields by launching our first oncology product in the UK.

And so we finish at the present day. Since the turn of the millennium, we have introduced the UK's first 7-day analgesic patch and the first opioid agonist/antagonist combination. We have also brought our staff back onto one site on the science park by occupying three new buildings a short walk from our flagship headquarters. We have a healthy product pipeline, with a number of product launches scheduled in the coming years in the fields of analgesics, oncology and respiratory.