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Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry is the collective business enterprise employed in discovering, developing, manufacturing, and marketing legal drugs.
History of the Pharmaceutical Industry
The roots of the pharmaceutical industry lie back with the apothecaries and pharmacies that offered traditional remedies as far back as the middle ages, offering a hit-and-miss range of treatments based on centuries of folk knowledge.
But the industry as we understand it today really has its origins in the second half of the 19th century. Whilst the scientific revolution of the 17th century had spread ideas of rationalism and experimentation, and the industrial revolution had transformed the production of goods in the late 18th century, the marrying of the two concepts for the benefit of human health was a comparatively late development.
Merck in Germany was possibly the earliest company to move in this direction. Originating as a pharmacy founded in Darmstadt in 1668, it was in 1827 that Heinrich Emanuel Merck began the transition towards an industrial and scientific concern, by manufacturing and selling alkaloids.
Similarly, whilst GlaxoSmithKline’s origins can be traced back as far as 1715, it was only in the middle of the 19th century that Beecham became involved in the industrial production of medicine, producing patented medicine from 1842, and the world’s first factory for producing only medicines in 1859.
America’s pharmaceutical founding fathers
Meanwhile in the USA, Pfizer was founded in 1849 by two German immigrants, initially as a fine chemicals business. Their business expanded rapidly during the American civil war as demand for painkillers and antiseptics rocketed.
Research and Development
The period between 1918 and 1939 was marked by two breakthroughs that presaged the arrival of the pharma industry as we know it today. The first was insulin – Frederick Banting and colleagues managed to isolate insulin that could treat diabetes, up until that point a fatal condition. But it was only in collaboration with the scientists at Eli Lilly that they were able to sufficiently purify the extract and industrially produce and distribute it as an effective medicine.
The second was penicillin, a discovery of an impact possibly unparalleled by any other in medicine. After Alexander Fleming’s initial discovery of the penicillium mould’s antibiotic properties in 1928, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain’s further experimentation, a government-supported international collaboration including Merck, Pfizer and Squibb worked on mass producing the drug during World War Two, saving thousands of soldiers’ lives. The immense scale and sophistication of the penicillin development effort marked a new era for the way the pharmaceutical industry developed drugs. The war had also encouraged research into everything from new analgesics to drugs against typhus, with a great deal of collaboration between the companies and government.
Patent Medicine
Pharmaceutical Economics
Marketing
Pharmaceutical Lobby
Social Media Influencers
- Mar 1, 2019 Public citizen: Companies Are Reaping Benefits from Social Influencers, and Big Pharma Wants In
Returns on Investment
Regulation of Pharmaceutical Industry
Different governing bodies regulate the pharmaceutical industry according to their own legal and governance structures.
The Thalidomide scandal of 1961 prompted an increase in the regulation and testing of drugs before licensing, with a new amendment to US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules demanding proof of efficacy and accurate disclosure of side-effects for new medications (the Kefauver-Harris Amendment) being implemented in 1962. Likewise, the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki put greater ethical structures on clinical research, clearly cementing the difference between production of scientific prescription medicines and other chemicals. https://web.archive.org/web/20200929225934/https://pharmaphorum.com/r-d/a_history_of_the_pharmaceutical_industry/