Who Founded Bausch Health?

Eugene Melnyk built Biovail into Canada's largest publicly traded pharmaceutical company, with revenue growing from about $19M in 1995 to roughly $1.07B in 2006. Biovail's approach was to take drugs whose patents had expired and reformulate them with its own controlled-release technology, including Tiazac, launched in 1996, and Wellbutrin XL, licensed for U.S. distribution in 2001. Melnyk stepped down as chief executive in 2004, the year after he bought the Ottawa Senators, and retired as chairman in 2007 after an accounting investigation that Biovail settled with the SEC and the Ontario Securities Commission. He opposed the 2010 merger with Valeant, telling the CBC that the combined company was doomed to fail under its debt load, a warning that the 2015 collapse and the roughly $30B of debt left behind made difficult to dismiss.

Eugene Melnyk was born in 1959 in Toronto. Education: St. Michael's College School.

Milan Panic ran ICN Pharmaceuticals for four decades and made it known for the broad-spectrum antiviral ribavirin, sold as Virazole. His tenure was also marked by repeated governance disputes, and shareholders removed him in 2002; the company took the Valeant Pharmaceuticals name the following year and later merged with Canada's Biovail to form what is now Bausch Health. Panic died in Pasadena, California on September 24, 2026. The other half of the group's identity is older still: Bausch + Lomb was founded in Rochester, New York in 1853 by the German immigrants John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb, went on to make Ray-Ban sunglasses and the SofLens soft contact lens in 1971, was bought by Valeant for $8.7B in 2013, and supplied the corporate name adopted in 2018. Milan Panic was born in 1932.