Pharmaceutical industry

The pharmaceutical industry is an industry involved in medicine that discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical goods for use as drugs which are then administered to (or self-administered by) patients. These medications are created and put to market for the curing or preventing of disease, as well as alleviating symptoms of illness or injury.^[1][2]

Pharmaceutical companies may deal in "generic" medications and medical devices without the involvement of intellectual property, in "brand" materials specifically tied to a given company's history, or in both within different contexts. The industry's various subdivisions include distinct areas, such as manufacturing biologics, which are all subject to a variety of laws and regulations that govern the patenting, efficacy testing, safety evaluation, and marketing of these drugs. The global pharmaceuticals market produced treatments worth a total of $1,228.45 billion in 2020. The sector showed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.8% in 2021, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[3]

In historical terms, a pharmaceutical industry as an intellectual concept arose within the middle to late 1800s inside of certain nation-states with developed economies such as Germany, Switzerland, and the United States given that multiple businesses engaging in synthetic organic chemistry, such as a number of firms generating dyestuffs derived from coal tar on a large scale, sought out new applications of their artificial materials in terms of human health. This trend to increased capital investment occurred in tandem with the scholarly study of pathology as a field advancing significantly, and a variety of businesses set up cooperative relationships with academic laboratories evaluating human injury and disease. Examples of industrial companies with a pharmaceutical focus that have endured to this day after such distant beginnings include Bayer (based out of Germany) and Pfizer (based out of the U.S.).^[4]