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]
Developing world[edit]
Patents[edit]
Patents have been criticized in the developing world, as they are thought to reduce access to existing medicines.[154] Reconciling patents and universal access to medicine would require an efficient international policy of price discrimination. Moreover, under the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization, countries must allow pharmaceutical products to be patented. In 2001, the WTO adopted the Doha Declaration, which indicates that the TRIPS agreement should be read with the goals of public health in mind, and allows some methods for circumventing pharmaceutical monopolies: via compulsory licensing or parallel imports, even before patent expiration.[155]
In March 2001, 40 multi-national pharmaceutical companies brought litigation against South Africa for its Medicines Act, which allowed the generic production of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) for treating HIV, despite the fact that these drugs were on-patent.[156] HIV was and is an epidemic in South Africa, and ARVs at the time cost between US$10,000 and US$15,000 per patient per year. This was unaffordable for most South African citizens, and so the South African government committed to providing ARVs at prices closer to what people could afford. To do so, they would need to ignore the patents on drugs and produce generics within the country (using a compulsory license), or import them from abroad. After international protest in favour of public health rights (including the collection of 250,000 signatures by Médecins Sans Frontières), the governments of several developed countries (including The Netherlands, Germany, France, and later the US) backed the South African government, and the case was dropped in April of that year.[157]
In 2016, GlaxoSmithKline (the world's sixth largest pharmaceutical company) announced that it would be dropping its patents in poor countries so as to allow independent companies to make and sell versions of its drugs in those areas, thereby widening the public access to them.[158] GlaxoSmithKline published a list of 50 countries they would no longer hold patents in, affecting one billion people worldwide.
Charitable programs[edit]
In 2011 four of the top 20 corporate charitable donations and eight of the top 30 corporate charitable donations came from pharmaceutical manufacturers. The bulk of corporate charitable donations (69% as of 2012) comes by way of non-cash charitable donations, the majority of which again were donations contributed by pharmaceutical companies.[159]
Charitable programs and drug discovery & development efforts by pharmaceutical companies include:
