Eli Lilly and Company is an American pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, with offices in 18 countries. Its products are sold in approximately 125 countries. The company was founded in 1876 by, and named after, Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist and veteran of the American Civil War.

Lilly's achievements include being the first company to mass-produce the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, and insulin. It was one of the first pharmaceutical companies to produce human insulin using recombinant DNA including Humulin (insulin medication), Humalog (insulin lispro), and the first approved biosimilar insulin product in the US, Basaglar (insulin glargine).

The company’s milestones:

May 10, 1876: Lilly opened his own laboratory in Indianapolis, where he began to manufacture medicinal drugs.

1881: Lilly formally incorporated the business as Eli Lilly and Company, elected a board of directors, and issued stock to family members and close associates.

1883: the company contracted to mix and sell Succus Alteran, its first widely successful product and one its best sellers.

Late 1880s: Colonel Lilly was one of the Indianapolis area's leading businessmen, whose company had more than one-hundred employees and had $200,000 in annual sales.

1894: Lilly purchased a manufacturing plant to be used solely for creating capsules. The company also made several technological advances in the manufacturing process, including automating its capsule production.

1913: The company began constructions of the Lilly Biological Laboratories, a research and manufacturing plant on 150 acres near Greenfield, Indiana.

1917: The Lilly facility in Indianapolis was "the largest capsule factory in the world" and was "capable of producing 2.5 million capsules a day".

1920s: Eli introduced the new concept of straight-line production, where raw materials entered at one end of the facility and the finished product came out the other end, in the company's manufacturing process.

1923: Lilly began selling Iletin (Insulin, Lilly), their tradename for the first commercially available insulin product in the U.S for the treatment of diabetes.

In 1934:

• the firm opened two new facilities on the McCarty Street complex: a replica of Lilly's 1876 laboratory and the new Lilly Research Laboratories, "one of the most fully equipped facilities in the world."
• Eli Lilly and Company Limited, the company's first overseas subsidiary was established in England, with headquarters in London and a manufacturing plant in Basingstoke.

Early 1940s: Lilly became one of the companies mass-producing penicillin.

1943: Eli Lilly International Corp. was formed as a subsidiary to encourage business trade abroad.

By 1948: Lilly employees worked in thirty-five countries, most of them as sales representatives in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

1950s: Lilly introduced two new antibiotics: vancomycin and erythromycin. In addition, Lilly was heavily involved in the production and distribution of Jonas Salk's poliomyelitis (polio) vaccine.

1954: Lilly formed Elanco Products Company for the production of veterinary pharmaceuticals.

1968: Lilly built its first research facility, the Lilly Research Centre Limited, outside the United States near London, England in Surrey.

1970s-1980s: Eli Lilly and Company saw a flurry of drug production: an antibiotic, Keflex, in 1971; a heart drug, Dobutrex, in 1977; Ceclor, which would become the world's top selling oral antibiotic, in 1979; a leukemia drug, Eldisine; an antiarthritic, Oraflex; and an analgesic, Darvon.

1998: Eli Lilly formed a joint venture with Icos Corporation (ICOS), a Bothell, Washington-based biotechnology company, to develop and commercialize Cialis, a product for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

January 2011: Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly and Company announced their global agreement for the joint development and marketing of new APIs for diabetes therapy.

September 2020: Amgen announced that they had partnered with Eli Lilly to manufacture their COVID-19 antibody therapies.

2023: The company's research and development focus has been reported to be on drugs in the obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's and autoimmune areas.

According to Wikipedia