The Experta Company, specializing in scientific evaluation of medicaments, was founded in the city of Brno in 1933. Its main task was to control medicaments and mass–produced medicinal preparations, the so-called specialties, offered for their evaluation by pharmaceutical factories. The specialties were analysed using chemical, pharmacological, pharmaceutical, and biological methods. The analyses took place in the laboratories of the Medical Faculty and the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Masaryk University in Brno, and also at the College of Veterinary Surgeons in Brno. The main aim of Experta was to confirm and openly show that the composition of specialties is safe and that the medicaments could be trusted by doctors once evaluated and marked by an Experta mark. The company also made an attempt to prove that medicaments produced in our homeland are equal to those produced abroad, and hereby to support medical prescriptions of Czechoslovak remedies. All the steps taken by Experta were to contribute to economic cost savings of not only our state and health insurance companies but also to those of the patients themselves. Officially the Experta Company came to an end of its existence in 1948; however, the clouds over it darkened earlier, before the Second World War broke out. Despite the fact that Experta existed for only a relatively short period of time and that it did not implement all its aims, its conception and attempts to create in Czechoslovakia in 1934–1948 an independent controlling institute for medical specialties were remarkable and progressive (especially the emphasis on biological control of specialties).

        Key words: pharmaceutical preparations – drug control – pharmaceutical industry – proprietary medicines