Joan Uriach Marsal, modernizer of the pharmaceutical company and father of Biodramina, dies

Joan Uriach Marsal used to say that his grandfather had run a drugstore; his father had been a salesman, and he, an industrial researcher. This is how the honorary president of the family pharmaceutical company summarized its evolution throughout the company's history, which now spans 186 years. Uriach Marsal has died at the age of 95 after having been key in the modernization and internationalization of the company, consolidated as a benchmark in the sector.

Born in Barcelona in 1929, he joined the family company in 1955, when the company already had more than a century of history, after starting out in 1838 as a drugstore in El Born. From this role as an industrial researcher, Uriach Marsal promoted the group's first R&D department ten years later. The following decade brought with it the construction of Uriach's first factory, and then, internationalization arrived.

From this innovative R&D department came products such as Fisiocrem, Lipograsil and, above all, Biodramina. Uriach Marsal, who refers to himself as Doctor Biodramina in his autobiography, created this treatment for motion sickness after hearing about an active ingredient used by American soldiers going to fight in Normandy. Uriach traveled to the United States to find it and market it in Spain, and so he did. This was the facet of the industrial researcher.

With this spirit and as a member of the fourth generation of the family business, which he went on to preside over in 1986, Uriach was the architect of the group's modernization and internationalization process, and also of its professionalization. But his work went beyond pharmacy, and in 1988 he created the Uriach Foundation, with the aim of making it a reference center for the dissemination of the history of health sciences, the promotion of natural health and the company's historical-artistic heritage. And it was not only the company that came from his family, but also his passion for art, especially Catalan painting. So much so that he was not only a member of the Royal Academy of Pharmacy of Catalonia and of Medicine, but also of Fine Arts, as a great cultural patron.

Uriach, who was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Generalitat in 1987, presided over the group until 2005, and was also president of the sector's employers' association, Farmaindústria. After having handed over the presidency of the group, in 2015 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal National Academy of Pharmacy, in recognition of his career and his role within the industry.

The pharmaceutical company, now specialized in over-the-counter products —known as consumer healthcare—, now operates with the fifth generation, with Uriach Marsal's son, Enrique Uriach, as president of the Owners' Council, and with Luis Canterell as president of the board of directors, the first external to the family.