Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry develops, produces and markets medications licensed for use as drugs. The majority of today's pharmaceutical companies were founded in the late 19th and early 20th century, with key discoveries such as penicillin and insulin being mass-manufactured and distributed in the 1920s and 1930s. As the pharmaceutical industry matured, prescription and non-prescription drugs became legally distinguished from one another, and the improved understanding of human biology (including DNA) and the development of systematic scientific approaches and sophisticated manufacturing techniques led to the increased rise of the industry.

During the 50's and 60's, a huge number of new drugs were developed and marketed, such as blood-pressure drugs, the first oral contraceptive, tranquilizers (e.g. Valium and chlorpromazine) and cortisone. After the thalidomide tragedy in the late 50's and early 60's, where inadequate tests were carried out to assess the drug's safety, leading to catastrophic results for the children of women who had taken the drug during their pregnancies, the World Medical Association issued its Declaration of Helsinki in 1964. This required pharmaceutical companies to prove efficacy in clinical trials before marketing drugs; it also set standards for clinical research and demanded that subjects give their informed consent before enrolling in an experiment.

In the 1970s, the pharmaceutical industry began to expand at a greater rate. However, by the mid-1980s, the smaller biotechnology firms were beginning to struggle for survival, which led to corporate buyouts and the formation of mutually beneficial partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical manufacturing became concentrated, with just a few companies producing medicines within each country, and a few large companies holding a dominant position worldwide.

New environmental and safety regulations were brought in during the 1980s, which transformed the pharmaceutical industry, helped along by new technologies for computation and analysis and by new DNA chemistries.

Now, in the new millennium, there are more than 200 major pharmaceutical companies, which together form one of the most profitable industries in the world. Looking to the future, advances in biotechnology and the human genome project promise ever more complex, sophisticated, and possibly more individualised, drugs and medications.