Book Overview

1.1 Development of the bio Pharmaceutical Industry The modern pharmaceutical industry traces its origin to two sources: apothecaries that moved into wholesale production of drugs such as morphine, quinine, and strychnine in the middle of the 19th century and dye and chemical companies that established research labs and discovered medical applications for their products starting in the 1880s. Merck, for example, began as a small apothecary shop in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1668, only beginning wholesale production of drugs in the 1840s. Likewise, Schering in Germany; Hoffmann–La Roche in Switzerland; Burroughs Wellcome in England; Etienne Poulenc in France; and Abbott, Smith Kline, Parke–Davis, Eli Lilly, Squibb, and Upjohn in the U.S. all started as apothecaries and drug suppliers between the early 1830s and late 1890s. Other firms whose names carry recognition today began with the production of organic chemicals (especially dyestuffs) before moving into pharmaceuticals. These include Agfa, Bayer, and Hoechst in Germany; Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz in Switzerland; Imperial Chemical Industries in England; and Pfizer in the U.S. A merging of these two types of firms into an identifiable pharmaceutical industry took place in conjunction with the emergence of pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacology as scientific fields at the end of the 19th century. Oriented to identifying and prepÃ¥ synthetic drugs and studying their impacts on pathological conditions, both disciplines were intimately linked with the rise of the industry. The first stages of development of the modern pharmaceutical industry can be traced back to the turn of the century. At that time, the medical community had at their disposal only drugs which were effective in treating specific diseases: Ÿ Digitalis (extracted from Fox glove) was known to stimulate heart muscle and hence used to treat various heart conditions. Ÿ Quinine obtained from the bark/roots of a plant (Cinchona Species) was used to treat malaria; Ÿ Pecacuanha (active ingredient is a mixture of alkaloids), used for treating dysentery, was obtained from the bark/roots of the plant species Cephaelis; Ÿ Mercury, for the treatment of syphilis. Development in biology, as well as a developing appreciation of the principles of organic chemistry, helped in the fledging pharmaceutical industry. The successful synthesis of various artificial dyes, which proved to be therapeutically useful, led to the formation of pharmaceutical/chemical companies such as Bayer and Hoechst in the late 1800s. Scientists at Bayer, for example, succeeded in synthesizing aspirin in 1895. Despite these early advances, it was not until in the 1930s that the pharmaceutical industry began to develop in earnest. The initial landmark discovery of the era was the discovery and chemical synthesis of the sulpha drugs. These drugs proved effective in the treatment of a wide variety of bacterial infections.