A pharmaceutical company, or drug company, is a commercial business licensed to research, develop, market and most commonly in the context of healthcare. The pharmaceutical industry entered the 1980s pressured by economics and a host of new regulations, both safety and environmental, but also transformed by new DNA chemistries and new technologies for analysis and computation. Drugs for heart disease and for AIDS were a feature of the 1980s, involving challenges to regulatory bodies and a faster approval process. There are now more than 200 major pharmaceutical companies and employing more political lobbyists than any other industry.

Most of today’s major pharmaceutical companies were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Key discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s, such as insulin and penicillin, became mass-manufactured and disturbed. Switzerland, Germany and Italy had particularly strong industries. And, a biotechnology company that uses derivates of biological systems or living organisms to make products for specific use. Often biotechnology companies produce pharmaceutical drugs. Biotechnology combines disciplines like genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology and cell biology, which are in turn linked to practical disciplines like chemical engineering, information technology, and robotics.

In several ways, the biotech sector is the next evolution of the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries are becoming more and more contingent on each other. Both pharma and biotech companies focus on providing patients with safe and effective drugs that significantly improve quality of life or save lives. Drug companies are using the research utensils as well as products developed by biotech companies to develop the new blockbuster drugs of tomorrow. Biotech, in turn, is becoming reliant on financing from the pharmaceutical industry to prop up its expensive research and development programs.

Conversely pharmaceutical marketing is no longer a matter of merely pushing a message down to physicians and consumers. The use of social and interactive technology has put the customer in control of the message. Online communities and blogs allow the public to discuss and debate health concerns and the medicines that treat them. It is standard for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for a number of large disease areas in order to sustain their growth and influence in those markets, many biotechs, are much more specialized in one or a few disease areas. Moreover, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are increasingly turning to strategic partnerships to overcome resource restraints and optimize the value of their product portfolios.