A pharmaceutical company, or drug company, is a company approved to discover, develop, market and hand out drugs.

Most chief pharmaceutical companies were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though it is only since the 1950's the industry got happening in earnest. The discovery of penicillin is extensively regarded as the birth of current pharmaceuticals - this was the moment where systematic technical approaches, understanding of human biology and complicated manufacturing techniques all made the development of medicines probable. The industry remained comparatively small scale until a long period of scientific advancements through the 1970s to there day elevated some companies to become among the mainly profitable and productive in the world.

The industry has delivered significantly better treatment for patients and morbidity/ mortality rates across developing countries persist to fall due in no small part to the improvement of research-based pharmaceutical companies.

There are currently extra than 200 major pharmaceutical companies. As in several other industries, economic pressures are forcing pharmaceutical companies toward greater competence. The costs of research and manufacture of ever additional sophisticated medicines grows every year and the worry between the affordability of new medicines and their benefits appear certain to be a continuing major debating point.

Biotechnology has obtainable new possibilities for the future. The first generations of ‘biologic’ therapies are already in use, particularly in cancer. Vaccines, after many years in the research doldrums, are a renewed focus of interest as better understanding of genetics offers new ideas on how disease might be prevented. Looking to the far future it may even be possible, through the promising science of pharmacogenomics, to tailor medicines to every individual.

A biotechnology company is any corporation that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or adjust products or processes for specific use. Often biotechnology companies make pharmaceuticals. Typically a biopharmaceutical made in this manner is composed of extremely large molecules that are unstable and must be administered by injection in a physician's office.

It remains an extremely exploratory area. Biotech companies very often start life as very little spin-offs from university explore departments and are high-tech 'start-up' companies. They often need to get bought out or enter into a licensing accord with a big mainstream pharmaceutical company to see their idea really available for patients.

Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific regulation at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing, synthesizing and rising pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of fresh chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes learn of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity associations (QSAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on value aspects of medicines and aims to assure fitness for the reason of medicinal products.

Medicinal chemistry is a extremely interdisciplinary science combining organic chemistry with biochemistry, computational chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, statistics, and physical chemistry.

Discovery
The first step of drug discovery involves the recognition of new active compounds, often called "hits", which are classically found by screening many compounds for the desired biological properties. These hits can come from usual sources, such as plants, animals, or fungi. More often, the hits can come from artificial sources, such as historical complex collections and combinatorial chemistry.

Recent developments in robotics and miniaturization have really accelerated and automated the screening process. Naturally, a company will assay over 100,000 individual compounds before moving to the optimization step.

Optimization
The second step of drug discovery involves the synthetic change of the hits in order to get better the biological properties of the compound pharmacophore. The quantitative structure-activity relationship of the pharmacophore play an significant part in finding "lead compounds", which exhibit the most potency, the majority selectivity, best pharmacokinetics and least toxicity.

Development
The last step involves the rendering the "lead compounds" fit for use in clinical trials. This involves the optimization of the synthetic way for bulk production, and the preparation of an appropriate drug formulation.

Pharmacists are health professionals who perform the art and science of pharmacy. In their conventional role, pharmacists characteristically take a request for medicines from a prescribing health care supplier in the form of a medical prescription and dispense the medication to the patient and counsel them on the proper use and unfavorable effects of that medication. In this role, pharmacists ensure the safe and efficient use of medications. Pharmacists also contribute in disease state management, where they optimize and monitor drug treatment - often in teamwork with physicians and/or other health professionals. Pharmacists have many areas of skill and are a critical source of medical information in clinics, hospitals, and community pharmacies all through the world.

Pharmacists are occasionally small-business owners, owning the pharmacy in which they perform. They are also very skilled and particular individuals with specific knowledge that makes them a vital division of any healthcare team. They act as an educated intermediary between patients and physicians to ensure that good medical therapy is chosen and implemented in the best way probable. Pharmacists are occasionally referred to as chemists (or dispensing chemists), which sometimes causes perplexity with scientists in the field of chemistry. This term is a historical one, since pharmacists initially were required to whole an undergraduate degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry (PhC) and were known as "Pharmaceutical Chemists".

The basic condition for pharmacists to be considered for registration is an undergraduate or postgraduate Pharmacy degree from a recognized university. In most countries this involves a four-year course to achieve a Bachelor of Pharmacy (BPharm) degree. In order to practice as a pharmacist, the someone must be registered with the relevant statutory body, which governs the registration and practice of pharmacy within the territory of its jurisdiction. There is often an obligation for the pharmacy graduate to have completed a certain number of hours of knowledge in a pharmacy, under the management of a registered pharmacist. The statutory body will typically administer a written and oral examination to the potential pharmacist prior to registration.

Pharmacists are skilled in fields including pharmacology, chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmacy practice, pharmaceutics, pharmacy law, physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, kinetics, nephrology, hepatology, and compounding medications. Additional curriculum covers basic diagnosis with importance on disease state management, therapeutics and prescribing.

Pharmacognosy is the learning of medicines from natural sources.

Originally - during the 19th century and the opening of the 20th century - the term was used to define the bough of the medicine or even of the commodity sciences, which dealt with medicines in their basic, or unprepared, form.

As "crude drug" it is in fact to be meant here a dried untrained natural material, which is used in the medicine.

The word "Pharmacognosy" derives in detail from the Greek words pharmakon (drug), and gnosis or information.

The word "Pharmakognosie" represented for years in the German speaking area - where this term was born and the regulation had and still has its lynch-pin - a synonym of "Drogenkunde".

Pharmacognosy is meant today as a division of the pharmacy, which has its focus on medicines from usual sources and whose scope is the identification or verification of crude drugs using macroscopical, microscopical, or chemical methods.

It can include nowadays the learning of the botany, ethno botany, chemistry, pharmacology, and clinical pharmacy of crude drugs, and the majority of the pharmacognostic studies are normally focused on medicinal plants/herbal medicines.

In a little academic context, the term has been artificially extended to cover also the study of pure, isolated substances of normal origin as well as the search for new drugs from natural sources.

Although today pharmacognosy is taught in extremely few pharmacy schools in the US and UK, the subject is still compulsory within most pharmacy curricula in continental European universities.

Phillipe Pinel (1793) is often recognized as being the first to introduce humane methods into the treatment of the spiritually ill as the superintendent of the Asylum de Bicetre in Paris. A hospital worker of Asylum de Bicetre, Jean-Baptiste Pussin, was really the first one to eliminate patient restraints. Pussin influenced Pinel and they equally served to spread reforms such as categorizing the disorders, as well as observing and talking to patients as methods of heals. At much the similar time William Tuke was pioneering a more enlightened approach to the treatment of the spiritually ill in England at the Retreat in York. This grows to other charitable institutions such as St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton. These ideas slowly took hold in different countries, and in the United States attitudes towards the treatment of the mentally ill began to severely improve during the mid-19th century.

Reformers, such as Dorothea Dix in the U.S., began to supporter a more humane and progressive attitude towards the mentally ill. In the United States, for illustration, numerous states recognized state mental health systems paid for by taxpayer money. These centralized institutions were often linked with slack governmental bodies, though in common oversight was not high and quality consequently varied. They were normally geographically isolated as well, situated away from urban areas because the land was cheap and there was less political opposition. Several state hospitals in the United States were built in the 1850s and 1860s on the Kirkbride Plan, an architectural style destined to have curative effect.

While many of folks in state hospitals were voluntarily admitted, many more were involuntarily dedicated by courts. For this reason, state hospital patients were typically from the lower class, as the mentally unwell from families with money often had enough private care to avoid being labeled a public menace.

In the United States, state hospitals in various places began to overflow by the beginning of the 20th century. As state populations increased, so did the number of mentally ill and so did the price of housing them in centralized institutions. During wartime, state mental hospitals became even extra overburdened, often serving as hospitals for returning servicemen as well as for their normal clientele. The inducement to discharge patients was high, yet there were still no sufficient treatments or therapies for the mentally ill.