Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in America: A Brief History

Abstract

This article reviews the history of drug manufacturing and changes in the compounding of drugs by pharmacies in the United States and outlines opportunities for new research into the making of medicines. The pharmaceutical industry has long been on the vanguard of globalization, and drug companies restructured their international manufacturing footprints frequently in the 19th and 20th centuries. Firms in the prescription drug sector were among the first to market products internationally, to build manufacturing plants around the world, and to integrate research from laboratories across multiple time zones. Yet, issues of quality and safety have arisen repeatedly and the industry has continued to produce its newest medicines in North America even as technological capabilities increased significantly in China, India, and elsewhere since the 1980s. Compounding pharmacies, by contrast, experienced a steady decline during the second half of the 20th century as medicines arrived from producers in final form. The emergence of individualized therapies, however, is now bringing a resurgence in business for biological labs acting in many ways as compounders. Broadly, as pharmaceutical firms turned to a business model built around research and intellectual property production, and as pharmacists shifted from producing medicines to repackaging them for patients, analysts likewise turned to regulation, pricing, and new product innovation as subjects of their research. As a consequence, pharmaceutical manufacturing is largely ignored in the recent historiography of medicine, pharmacy, and pharmaceuticals, an oversight that should be rectified.