API manufacturing, also known as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients
processing is important in stopping the reoccurrence of the
pre-antibiotic era. A pre-antibiotic world refers to one where disease
causing organisms undergo rapid genetic changes and become resistant to
existing medications that have taken API manufacturing processes and
research decades to develop. Since the efficiency of human and
veterinary medications depend on the active ingredients making up their
composition, global disease control and eradication depends on
innovative and groundbreaking discoveries made in the API industry. For
instance, Edward Jenner’s discovery of immunization active ingredients
200 years ago today saves nine million lives annually around the world.
Political, technological and economic constrains are increasingly making
it difficult to achieve success rates attained by Jenner and Jonas Salk
who came up with poliomyelitis vaccine’s active ingredients in
1955.Leading emerging economies involved in API production such as India
for instance sell APIs with a profit margin of 3 percent making it
difficult to raise sufficient capital for expansion and set aside money
for in-depth research to come up with better, more efficient medicinal ingredients. As a result, medicines in pharmacy shelves
especially in developing countries are fast becoming obsolete. On the
other hand, disease causing organisms imbibe APIs in the outdated
remedies making them more complex and troublesome to eradicate from the
human body.
Pharmaceutical policies such as “evergreening” are also an impediment to
the development of efficient APIs. Evergreening is a pharmaceutical
industry concept that allows for the renaming of generic drugs produced
using the original medication’s formulation to attain the same dosage
values. This creates a public perception that there is a new remedy with
better APIs whereas there isn’t. For example the generic fenofibrate
50mg in a different packaging is similar to the branded 50mg
fenofibrate. Policies of this kind have arrested the development of
stronger APIs in countries like United States. The U.S. pharmaceutical
industry also obtains 40 percent of its active ingredients from China
where API production is done using basic technologies with less
stringent regulatory measures to ensure quality and safety.