The pharmaceutical industry can be defined as a complex
of processes, operations and organisations involved in the
discovery, development and manufacture of drugs and medications.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines a drug or
pharmaceutical preparation as:
any substance or mixture of substances manufactured,
sold, offered for sale or represented for use in the diagnosis,
treatment, mitigation or prevention of disease, abnormal
physical state or the symptoms thereof in man or animal; [and for use in] restoring, correcting or modifying
organic functions in man or animal.
This is a very wide definition, and correspondingly, there
are number of key players in the pharmaceutical industry,
including: