Sterling Drug
American pharmaceutical company

Sterling Drug was an American based global pharmaceutical company. It was also known as Sterling Winthrop, Inc., after the merger with Winthrop-Stearns Inc. which itself resulted from the merger of Winthrop Chemical Company Inc. and Frederick Stearns & Company. It was formerly known as Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceuticals.
Primary product lines included diagnostic imaging agents, hormonal products, cardiovascular products, analgesics, antihistamines and muscle relaxants.
Chemical compounds produced by this company were often known by their manufacturing code which consisted of the abbreviation WIN (for Winthrop) followed by a number. For example, WIN 18,320 was nalidixic acid, the first quinolone antibiotic.
History
1910s
The Company was established in 1901 (then called Neuralgyline Co.) in Wheeling, West Virginia, by Albert H. Diebold and William E. Weiss, a pharmacist. At the end of World War I in 1918, Sterling purchased the US assets of a German company now known as Bayer AG for US$5.3 million.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sterling Drug” is american pharmaceutical company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sterling, Drug and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7611398. VIAF identifies the subject as 151334758. The Library of Congress control number is n85134602. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sterling Drug” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.