The Medicines Company was founded in 1996 by Warburg Pincus and other investors to acquire, develop, and commercialize late stage pharmaceutical compounds. The company was formed to take advantage of a fundamental structural change in the pharmaceutical industry - the increasing size of global pharmaceutical companies which, in turn, created increasing minimum sales requirements for individual drugs. Major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies would therefore be forced to divest these smaller assets and focus their resources on "blockbuster" products. However, the divested products could be significant products for an emerging biopharmaceutical company. The Medicines Company was one of the first venture-backed companies to capitalize on this structural change in the pharmaceutical industry and dozens of other companies have followed this business model. The Medicines Company business model creates the opportunity to change the risk-reward proposition of drug development by removing the time and cost associated with discovery and early clinical expenditures. The Medicines Company's flagship product is Angiomax, an acute care cardiovascular product acquired by the company in 1997, which was launched successfully in the U.S. in January 2001. The company has also acquired two other products that are currently in late-stage development.

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