How many pharmaceutical companies are there

Projected decrease in brand drug spending due to patent loss in the U. Share of U. World pharmaceutical sales by region forecast More interesting topics Related topics.

Global pharmaceutical industry. Top pharmaceutical drugs. Pharmaceutical industry in the UK. Biotech drug industry. Go to report. Matej Mikulic. Contact Get in touch with us. We are happy to help. Vianny Gutierrez-Cruz. Sales Manager — Contact United States. Ziyan Zhang. Customer Relations — Contact Asia. Meanwhile in the USA, Pfizer was founded in by two German immigrants, initially as a fine chemicals business. Their business expanded rapidly during the American civil war as demand for painkillers and antiseptics rocketed.

Whilst Pfizer was providing the medicines needed for the Union war effort, a young cavalry commander named Colonel Eli Lilly was serving in their army. A trained pharmaceutical chemist, Lilly was an archetype of the dynamic and multi-talented 19th century American industrialist, who after his military career, and trying his hand at farming, set up a pharmaceutical business in Another military man in the drugs business was Edward Robinson Squibb, who as a naval doctor during the Mexican-American war of — threw the drugs he was supplied with overboard due to their low quality.

Switzerland also rapidly developed a home-grown pharmaceutical industry in the second half of the 19th century. Previously a centre of the trade in textiles and dyes, Swiss manufacturers gradually began to realise their dyestuffs had antiseptic and other properties and began to market them as pharmaceuticals, in contrast to the origin in pharmacies of other enterprises.

It later moved into medicines, commercialising aspirin around the turn of the 20th century, one of the most successful pharmaceuticals ever at that point. These companies focused as much on cod liver oil, toothpaste, citric acid for soft drinks, and hair gel as on prescription medicines, as well as selling products like heroin on the over-the-counter market. The national rivalries and conflicts that characterised this period also had their impact on the developing industry.

Bayer also had its Russian subsidiary seized during the Russian revolution. The beginnings of the globalisation of the industry were seen both before and after the war — in the UK, import duties incentivised many foreign companies such as Wyeth, Sandoz, CIBA, Eli Lilly and MSD to set up subsidiaries in Britain in the post-war years.

The period between and was marked by two breakthroughs that presaged the arrival of the pharma industry as we know it today. The first was insulin — Frederick Banting and colleagues managed to isolate insulin that could treat diabetes, up until that point a fatal condition. But it was only in collaboration with the scientists at Eli Lilly that they were able to sufficiently purify the extract and industrially produce and distribute it as an effective medicine.

The second was penicillin, a discovery of an impact possibly unparalleled by any other in medicine. The immense scale and sophistication of the penicillin development effort marked a new era for the way the pharmaceutical industry developed drugs.

The war had also encouraged research into everything from new analgesics to drugs against typhus, with a great deal of collaboration between the companies and government.

In , the NHS brought in what was essentially a price fixing scheme to allow reasonable return on investment for drug manufacturers, solidifying the incentive to invest in new medicines.

Overview Pharmaceutical market: worldwide revenue Projection of top therapeutic areas by sales worldwide Patent expiration risks for total worldwide prescription drug revenue Worldwide prescription drug revenue - market risk from patent expiration COVID vaccine dose numbers by top manufacturer World pharmaceutical sales by region forecast More interesting topics Related topics.

Pharmaceutical industry in the U. Top pharmaceutical drugs. Go to report. Matej Mikulic. Contact Get in touch with us. We are happy to help. Vianny Gutierrez-Cruz. Sales Manager — Contact United States. Ziyan Zhang.