In 1935, Cipla was founded by Khwaja Abdul Hamied as 'The Chemical, Industrial & Pharmaceutical Laboratories' in Mumbai.
In July 1984, the name of the company was changed to 'Cipla Limited'.In 1985, the US FDA approved the company's bulk drug against HIV and other drugs to treat poor people in the developing world.
Led by the founder's son Yusuf Hamied, a Cambridge-educated chemist, the company provided generic AIDS and other drugs to treat poor people in the developing world.
In 1995, Cipla launched Deferiprone, the world's first oral iron chelator. In 2001, Cipla offered antiretrovirals for HIV treatment at a fractional cost .In 2013 Cipla acquired the South African company Cipla-Medpro, kept it as a subsidiary, and changed its name to Cipla Medpro South Africa Limited. At the time of the acquisition Cipla-Medpro had been a distribution partner for Cipla and was South Africa's third biggest pharmaceutical company. The company had been founded in 2002 and was known as Enaleni Pharmaceuticals Ltd. In 2005, Enaleni bought all the shares of Cipla-Medpro, which had been a joint venture between Cipla and Medpro Pharmaceuticals, a South African generics company, and in 2008 it changed its name to Cipla-Medpro.In September 2015, Cipla acquired InvaGen Pharmaceuticals and Exelan Pharmaceuticals, two American pharmaceutical companies, for 555 million dollars.In 2019 Cipla entered digital therapeutics by partnering with Wellthy Therapeutics in India and Brandmed in South Africa.
