HIPRA Brand Guidelines: A 1954 Madrid Lab, Amer & Vaccines for Farms, Pets and Fish

A 1954 laboratory, bought and moved to Catalonia.

HIPRA did not start in Catalonia. The company’s own history page says the business goes back to a small laboratory founded in Madrid in 1954, named after the surnames of its creators: Hidalgo and Prada, according to the company, while English Wikipedia gives the second name as Prado. The capitals in HIPRA are an acronym of those two names rather than a word.

The turning point came in 1971. Catalan Wikipedia says the pharmacist, veterinarian and chemist Joan Nogareda i Gifre, from Olot, led a group of investors that bought the Madrid firm that year and moved it to the province of Girona; since 1973 its headquarters have been in Amer. The company itself describes the buyers as “a group of young entrepreneurs.” Catalan Wikipedia adds that his brother Ernest and Pere Casadevall took part, and that the new firm specialised in medicines for farm animals: poultry, rabbits, pigs, sheep and cattle.

HIPRA’s history page treats 1991 as a crucial year, when the business had about 100 staff and a new management team set a policy of technical and commercial expansion. Catalan Wikipedia says the Nogareda family took control of the shareholding that year; English Wikipedia says the founder handed leadership to his children, with David Nogareda Estivill as president and Maria del Mar Nogareda Estivill as executive vice president.

Expansion abroad followed. The company says it began opening its own subsidiaries from 2000, naming HIPRA Philippines, created in 2003, as one of the first; English Wikipedia dates the first subsidiary to Uruguay in 1997. In 2009, the company says, it narrowed its mission to prevention and stopped investing in pharmacological products; English Wikipedia describes the same step as ending antibiotic manufacture to concentrate on vaccines.

Vaccines for farms, pets and fish.

Today HIPRA presents itself as a company of vaccines and diagnostics. Its animal-health pages describe work for pigs, poultry, cattle, goats and sheep, rabbits, dogs and farmed fish, and a range that takes in vaccines, vaccination devices, diagnostic services and data analysis. For fish farmers it names the ICTHIOVAC vaccine range and an autovaccine service. English Wikipedia says the company has developed more than 100 vaccines for production and companion animals.

Production is concentrated in a few places. English and Catalan Wikipedia both name the plant at Amer and a second plant in Brazil, in the Porto Alegre area, along with a university research centre in the United States. In August 2021 El País described HIPRA as a specialist in animal immunology with more than half a century of experience, more than 2,000 employees, 39 subsidiaries, two production plants in Spain and Brazil, and research centres in those two countries and the United States. The company now says it has subsidiaries in 40 countries, three research centres and six production plants in Europe and America, and that its products reach customers in more than 100 countries.

Partnerships carry its vaccines into new markets. In 2025, HIPRA says, it joined with Elanco to bring two avian metapneumovirus vaccines it manufactures, RESPIVAC aMPV and HIPRAVIAR TRT, to the US poultry market, after they were first introduced to selected producers under an emergency import licence earlier that year.

The company’s stated values are three words, “excellence, optimism and nonconformism,” and its tagline is “Building Immunity for a Healthier World.” Its history page says the 2009 shift towards prevention is reflected in its logo and claim.

How animal health companies present themselves.

Animal health companies speak to several audiences at once: veterinarians in clinics, farmers and producers, and the owners of dogs and cats. Their imagery tends to follow those audiences. A vet examining a dog or a cat on a consulting-room table is one of the most familiar scenes, alongside cattle in a barn, pigs in a pen and flocks of poultry, often shown with the people who look after them.

The products themselves are less photogenic, so the same few objects recur: vaccine vials, syringes, blister packs of tablets, spot-on pipettes and collars, along with laboratory benches, protective clothing and production lines. Many companies in the sector make both medicines for pets and vaccines for livestock, and their websites usually split the range by species rather than by product.

The sector also meets its customers in person. Trade fairs and congresses such as the VMX veterinary conference in Orlando and the World Veterinary Congress are where companies launch products, run booths and sponsor talks, and their stands carry much of the same photography of animals, clinics and farms.

Many of these companies also present themselves through the idea of One Health, which links the health of people, animals and the environment, and through the language of independence, family control or shared ownership where it applies. Ceva, for example, uses the slogan “Together, beyond animal health,” while Virbac points to the family that still controls it. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it and where it works.

An animal vaccine maker that moved into human health.

The pandemic pulled HIPRA beyond veterinary medicine. In August 2021 El País reported that Spain’s medicines agency, the AEMPS, had authorised the first human clinical trial of PHH-1V, a Covid-19 vaccine candidate developed by HIPRA and the first Spanish Covid-19 vaccine approved for human trials. On 30 March 2023 La Vanguardia reported that the European Medicines Agency had given its approval to the vaccine as a booster dose, to be sold as Bimervax, the first Covid-19 vaccine developed in Spain to reach the market. The company says its Human Health division was created in 2021, the year it also acquired GoodGut, a start-up working on diagnostic tests for digestive diseases; English Wikipedia dates the division to 2020.

Recognition followed at home. English Wikipedia says the Catalan government awarded HIPRA the Creu de Sant Jordi in June 2022 for its involvement in research on the new vaccine. In 2025, it adds, the company began operating a third division, a contract development and manufacturing service, and employed more than 2,800 people.

The company has stayed in Amer. English Wikipedia gives its formal name as Laboratorios Hipra S.A., headquartered there, and Catalan Wikipedia describes the Nogareda family as holding control of the shareholding since 1991.

For a design guide, HIPRA shows how a capitalised acronym from 1954 can carry a company through a change of owner, a move from Madrid to Catalonia and a step from farm vaccines into human medicine. Compare Elanco, its US poultry vaccine partner, and Zoetis, another animal-health company. For this guide we use a deep teal, a coral, a pale stone and an ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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