The Land of Pharma - 1

I'm going to start a new type of entry. I've have some experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry and, with all of the new attention on that industry, on socialized medicine and on the FDA, I figure I should try to explain what I know about the industry.
What are we talking about?
"Big Pharma" is a convenient way to discuss a certain kind of company. However, just as terms like "republican platform" or "socialism", Big Pharma does little to explain anything about the pharmaceutical industry. So let's begin by explaining as best we can everything that goes into this industry. Along the way, we'll do a pretty good job of describing a lot of industries, in case you, dear reader, are interested.
Behind the counter of any pharmacy lies hundreds of different prescription medicines. There's hundreds more in the surrounding area known as Over the Counter (OTC) drugs. That's just the piece found in the store. In every doctor's office are another host of medicines that can't be dispensed through the corner store. These are vaccines, tetanus shots, anti-venom shots, and things like that. In hospitals are another suite of therapies like antibiotics of last resort (those ultra-antibiotics that still work against our ever increasing number of antibiotic resistant super-pathogens). That's the goal. Everything we're going to talk about is a means to that end: medicine.
Let me say one more thing now. There are arguments or editorialists that hold to the idea that our reliance on Type II diabetes drugs is because of the larger issue of obesity. Or that we have these super-pathogens in the first place because of over use of antibiotics medicines and cleansers. They say that Big Pharma pushes it's products on the public and…. Yes, television is littered with drug advertisements and yes, millions of people run to the doctor for a prescription for a little ache or a sniffle. That interplay is incredibly important and interesting, but that won't be explored much here. We'll talk about the social use of these products only insofar as the public does use them and that gives this industry the same capitalist footing as any other industry.
So, the goal is medicine. We'll use the company I just imagined, The World Medicines Corporation, as our example. It's an established Fortune 500 company (way, way higher on the list than number 500, I assure you, as I only imagine big things) with factories and research centers all over the world. It employs many tens of thousands of people. This is the general conception of "Big Pharma," right? The World Medicines Corporation (WMC, as it's known on Wall Street) makes all forms of medicine as well, so we'll be able to look at each sort. And we'll start with two: Hemopres, a pill that lowers blood pressure and Menengvax, a shot that vaccinates against the virus that causes viral spinal meningitis.
Hemopres is one of those first drugs we talked about above. It's found behind the pharmacy counter in your local grocery store. It's called a "non-sterile small molecule" pharmaceutical. This type of pharmaceutical must be taken at some regular interval (this one is one 5 milligram, or mg, pill each day). It's an oral tablet, which means that when it's manufactured, it doesn't have to be manufactured to be sterile. A person's stomach is pretty much a big bag of acid and will kill most any bacteria that gets in there, so oral medicines don't need to be sterile. The small molecule (the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, or API) passes through the stomach into the intestines, where it is taken up into the blood stream. When the API circulates around the body, it can do it's work.
This is in contrast to Menengvax. Most vaccines (a biological product) are injectables (you don't get this in a pharmacy – a doctor or nurse sticks a needle "subcutaneously" and injects the fluid into your body). Vaccines, generally, are based on a protein or other complex molecular structure, which is a "large molecule." Proteins couldn't survive the acid in your stomach, so it's put into your body in a way that bypasses the stomach. But because it doesn't go though the protective acid of the stomach, it must be manufactured to be absolutely sterile. Also different from the small molecule pharmaceuticals, this vaccine will only need to be taken once (or at least only a couple of times). Vaccines make the body's immune system react as if you were sick. When that happens, the body "remembers" what made it sick and will be able to react much faster when the natural form of the illness-causing agent tries to infect the body again.
Before this gets too boring, I'll stop here and go further later.