Chiron Corporation ( ) was an American multinational biotechnology firm founded in 1981, based in Emeryville, California, that was acquired by Novartis on April 20, 2006. It had offices and facilities in eighteen countries on five continents. Chiron's business and research was in three main areas: biopharmaceuticals, vaccines, and blood testing. Chiron's vaccines and blood testing units were combined to form Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, while Chiron BioPharmaceuticals was integrated into Novartis Pharmaceuticals. In 2014, Novartis completed the sale of its blood transfusion diagnostics unit to Grifols and announced agreements for the sale of its vaccines unit to GlaxoSmithKline. Early history Chiron was founded in 1981 by chairman, William J. Rutter, president and chief executive, Professor Edward Penhoet, and vice president for research, Pablo DT Valenzuela. All were academics from the University of California; Penhoet at Berkeley, where he continued to lecture, and the others from San Francisco. Chiron formed a partnership with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Ciba-Geigy Ltd., through the Biocine Company, to use genetic engineering to develop vaccines and to treat, prevent and diagnose diseases such as AIDS, herpes and malaria. Other partnerships included Thicon Inc. to develop a growth factor hormone for the treatment of wounds and Merck & Co to develop an improvement to their existing hepatitis B vaccine. In 1986, Professor Penhoet said: "Our business strategy is to dominate small markets rather than take a small presence in a broad market." The niche that Chiron was focusing on was ophthalmology, which Mr. Penhoet said was "big enough to be interesting, but small enough to service with 40 salespeople." Professor Penhoet also stated that Chiron was set up to provide the enabling technology for others to use under license, and later saying that Chiron was "as close to a virtual corporation as you can be", with few fixed assets but more relationships. From 1982–1988, intense successive molecular biology studies at the Chiron Emeryville research labs, led by Dr. Michael Houghton, Dr. Qui-Lim Choo, and Dr. George Kuo, in collaboration with Dr. Daniel W. Bradley at the CDC, finally yielded in 1989 the identification of the genome of the viral agent responsible for 80 to 90% of non-A and non-B post-transfusion hepatitis—the agent called hepatitis C virus. For this ground breaking discovery, Michael Houghton was one of the winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Expansion In 1988, Chiron formed a joint venture company, called Mimesys