Bracco Brand Guidelines: Milan 1927, Italmerck Roots & Iopamidol Contrast Media

A Merck agency in Milan, 1927.

Bracco began in Milan on 1 June 1927, when Elio Bracco set up the Società Italiana Prodotti E. Merck to make, pack and sell the chemical products of the German company E. Merck of Darmstadt. The company’s historical archive says trading began on 1 July 1927 with five employees, rising to seventeen by the end of the year, and a first price list of twenty products. In December 1930 the business became Italmerck, and in November 1931 it opened a plant on Via Renato Fucini in Milan, built on a pentagonal plan, Italian Wikipedia says.

Elio’s son Fulvio Bracco, a chemistry graduate of the University of Pavia, joined on 1 October 1934. That year the firm launched Cebion, a Merck medicine based on vitamin C, the vitamin studied by the Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi. By 1935 the staff had grown to 82, thirty of them women, and in 1936 the company took the name Società Anonima Bracco, già Italmerck — “formerly Italmerck” — according to Italian Wikipedia, citing a memoir of Fulvio Bracco published by the Fondazione Bracco in 2012.

The war years were hard. The company’s archive says that from 1942 in particular the firm went through very difficult years, that it kept paying wages to the families of employees called up to the armed forces, and that in 1943 two large bombs hit the Fucini plant, with the damage repaired after a month of work. Italian Wikipedia, citing the same 2012 memoir, dates the Allied bombing to August 1943 and says production was suspended because of the war and a lack of raw materials. Production of the full list of medicines resumed in 1948.

After the war the family built a second business. In April 1946 Fulvio Bracco founded Cilag Italiana in Milan with Cilag of Schaffhausen, a purely chemical producer. In 1949 work began on a new plant in Milan’s Lambrate district, designed by the architect Giordano Forti, which started production in 1951. Cilag Italiana became Industria Chimica Dr. Fulvio Bracco in 1955, and in 1958 the two companies merged as Bracco Industria Chimica, Italian Wikipedia says.

Iodamide, iopamidol and an imaging focus.

Research turned towards radiology after the war. The company’s archive says the Lambrate laboratories worked mainly on iodinated contrast media for diagnostic X-ray imaging, and that in 1949 the chemist Ernst Felder began working with Bracco as head of research. In 1962 Bracco researchers created the company’s first original contrast agent, iodamide, both English and Italian Wikipedia say.

The molecule that shaped the modern company came next. Iopamidol, a non-ionic, water-soluble contrast agent, was synthesised in the early 1970s and launched in Italy and Germany in 1981; the company’s archive calls it the first ready-to-use non-ionic contrast medium. In 1988 Bracco opened a large production plant at Ceriano Laghetto, north of Milan, making raw materials for contrast media.

Expansion abroad followed. Bracco bought Sintetica of Mendrisio in Switzerland in 1987, later Bracco Suisse; set up a joint venture with Eisai in Japan in 1990; opened a research centre in Geneva in 1993; and in 1994 acquired Squibb Diagnostics of Princeton, New Jersey, from Bristol-Myers Squibb, founding Bracco Diagnostics Inc. At the end of 1999 the Bracco family announced the buy-back of the 50% stake that Merck KGaA of Darmstadt held in the group’s diagnostic and pharmaceutical businesses, Italian Wikipedia says.

In 2001 research, sales and marketing for imaging were brought together as Bracco Imaging. The same year the group bought ACIST Medical Systems of Minnesota, which makes contrast injection systems, and launched SonoVue, an ultrasound contrast agent conceived at its Geneva laboratories. In 2002 it opened the SPIN plant at Torviscosa, near Udine, on a former Snia Viscosa industrial site from the 1930s, and formed the Bracco Sine joint venture in Shanghai. It bought the radiology company E-Z-EM in 2008, and in 2016 sold its pharmaceutical division to the Italian group Dompé to concentrate on diagnostic imaging, English Wikipedia says.

Imaging agents and isotopes.

Radiopharmaceutical companies sell products that most people never see. A dose leaves a production site as a few millilitres in a small glass vial, travels inside a heavy shielded container and is given in a hospital’s nuclear-medicine department. So the industry’s pictures tend to show the places and machines around the product rather than the product itself.

The factory pictures are the most distinctive. Annual reports and websites in this field often show hot cells, the lead-shielded workstations where technicians handle radioactive material through thick windows and manipulator arms, and robotic dispensing systems that fill vials behind glass. Cyclotrons appear as large circular machines in bare concrete rooms, and research reactors are often photographed from above the pool, where the water glows blue around the core.

The second set of pictures comes from the scan itself. PET and SPECT images, usually shown in bright false colour over a grey outline of the body, are the clearest way to show what a tracer is for, and they recur in product pages, investor slides and congress booths. Alongside them sit images of time: couriers, vans and aircraft, because many isotopes decay within hours. Fluorine-18 has a half-life of about 110 minutes and technetium-99m about six hours, so supply chains are drawn as networks of sites and routes.

The trade meets at a small number of congresses, chiefly the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) in North America and the congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) in Europe, where booths, posters and product launches set much of the year’s visual language. This guide records what can be checked about each company’s history and ownership, and marks what rests only on its own word.

A pentagon from a 1931 factory.

Nuclear medicine came to Bracco through acquisition. In June 2019 Bracco Imaging bought Blue Earth Diagnostics, a molecular imaging company based in Oxford, from the investment firm Syncona, Italian Wikipedia says, citing AboutPharma and the Corriere della Sera. In 2021 Blue Earth Diagnostics licensed a radiopharmaceutical technology for therapeutic use in oncology, and in 2022 Bracco Imaging set up Blue Earth Therapeutics to develop radiopharmaceutical cancer treatments. In 2022 it also signed a global collaboration with the French group Guerbet on the MRI contrast agent gadopiclenol. After the Eisai joint venture was dissolved in 2023, it set up Bracco Japan in Tokyo, and in November 2024 Bracco Suisse opened Hexagon, a building in Geneva for producing microbubble ultrasound contrast agents, English Wikipedia says.

The group remains privately held. In September 2022, for its 95th anniversary, Wired Italia reported that Bracco was moving its headquarters back to the historic Lambrate site on Via Folli, rebuilt as a campus after work that began in January 2021, and opening a digital historical archive of some 10,000 documents. The archive project began in 1998, and in 2007 Lombardy’s archival superintendency declared the collection of notable historical interest, the magazine reported. Diana Bracco, Fulvio’s daughter, who joined in 1966 and became general manager in 1977, is president and chief executive of the group; Fulvio Renoldi Bracco, of the fourth generation, is vice-president and chief executive of Bracco Imaging.

The identity has its own origin story. The company’s archive says the pentagonal plan of the 1931 Fucini plant inspired the Bracco logo more than thirty years later — a factory floor plan turned into a mark.

For a design guide, Bracco shows how a family company can carry the shape of its first building into its mark across nearly a century. Compare Guerbet, its French partner on gadopiclenol, and GE HealthCare, another imaging group. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate blue and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bracco’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.