pharmaceutical industry

The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical drugs for the use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure and prevent diseases, or alleviate symptoms. Pharmaceutical companies may deal in generic or brand medications and medical devices. They are subject to a variety of laws and regulations that govern the patenting, testing, safety, efficacy using drug testing and marketing of drugs. The global pharmaceuticals market produced treatments worth $1,228.45 billion in 2020 and showed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.8%. History Mid-1800s – 1945: From botanicals to the first synthetic drugs The modern era of pharmaceutical industry began with local apothecaries that expanded from their traditional role of distributing botanical drugs such as morphine and quinine to wholesale manufacture in the mid-1800s, and from discoveries resulting from applied research. Intentional drug discovery from plants began with the isolation between 1803 and 1805 of morphine – an analgesic and sleep-inducing agent – from opium by the German apothecary assistant Friedrich Sertürner, who named this compound after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. By the late 1880s, German dye manufacturers had perfected the purification of individual organic compounds from tar and other mineral sources and had also established rudimentary methods in organic chemical synthesis. The development of synthetic chemical methods allowed scientists to systematically vary the structure of chemical substances, and growth in the emerging science of pharmacology expanded their ability to evaluate the biological effects of these structural changes.