Pharmaceutical industry

The pharmaceutical industry is an industry involved in medicine that discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical goods for use as drugs that function by being administered to (or self-administered by) patients using such medications with the goal of curing and/or preventing disease (as well as possibly alleviating symptoms of illness and/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 (which include distinct areas such as manufacturing biologics) are all subject to a variety of laws and regulations that govern entire financial processes including the patenting, efficacy testing, safety evaluation, and marketing of these drugs. The global pharmaceuticals market produced treatments worth $1,228.45 billion in 2020, in total, and this showed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.8% given the results of recent events (which includes 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 of 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]