How many pharmaceuticals exist

Different types of pharmaceutical companies specialise in making different pharmaceutical formulations. Additionally, these formulations all make use of different active substances, fillers and additives.

When we look at pharma products based on what part of the body they affect, the main types are as follows;. Additionally, the company, headquartered in Connecticut has drugs in various fields, such as immunology, neurosciences, rare diseases and oncology. In , the company received several FDA approvals, including popular medications such as Ibrance and Eliquis.

However, the company has been losing brand value for the last few years now. FDA regulates about 78 percent of the U. This includes everything we eat except for meat, poultry, and some egg products. There are over 20, prescription drug products approved for marketing. FDA oversees over 6, different medical device product categories. There was also a potential risk that the baclofen API might have been contaminated by endotoxin or microorganisms. From a national security perspective, it is useful to look at the locations of facilities for three sets of drugs:.

S market. The APIs manufactured in these facilities may be used in prescription drugs brand or generic , OTC drugs, and compounded drugs. For all regulated drugs, China has 13 percent of the API manufacturing facilities, while the United States has 28 percent , and the rest of the world has 59 percent.

See Figure 2 However, the percentages of APIs produced at these facilities may differ, and as mentioned above, cannot be determined from the data available to FDA. This list includes application and non-application products across a wide range of therapeutic categories such as anesthetic, antibacterial, antidepressant, antiviral, cardiovascular, anti-diabetic, and gastrointestinal agents.

See Figure 3. The three medicines are: capreomycin and streptomycin, both indicated to treat Mycobacterium tuberculosis; and sulfadiazine, used to treat chancroid and trachoma. FDA maintains a list of drugs that are used as medical countermeasures MCMs against threats in four categories: biological threats, chemical threats, influenza, and radiation threats. For APIs for 14 drugs in the biological threat category, China has 37 facilities, the United States has 19, and the rest of the world has China has just six of the facilities producing APIs for the 10 drugs in the chemical threat category, versus 24 in the United States and 52 in the rest of the world.

See Table 1. China has none of the facilities making APIs for medicines to prevent or treat influenza versus two in the United States and 16 in the rest of the world.

China also has none of the facilities producing APIs for radiation threats. The United States has 13 of these facilities versus 15 in the rest of the world. Ciprofloxacin and doxycycline are two drugs considered critical as MCMs and used to treat anthrax and plague. As shown in Table 2 below, the United States has one facility for ciprofloxacin, versus three in China and 21 in other foreign countries. The United States has fewer facilities than China or other foreign countries for doxycycline.

See Table 2. How has this dependence changed over time? Absent any intervention, FDA believes that this trend is likely to continue. As mentioned above, we do not know whether Chinese facilities are actually producing APIs, how much they are producing, or where the APIs they are producing are being distributed worldwide, including in the United States.

Resilience: How resilient is the U. How quickly could U. Since we do not currently know whether API manufacturing facilities are actually producing the drug, or in what volume, or what portion of U. Even if we could estimate the potential API shortfall and available production capacity, pharmaceutical companies make business decisions about whether to produce a drug product, including an API, and FDA does not have the power to tell them to make a drug.

This provides additional uncertainty in assessing the potential responsiveness of the U. FDA recently analyzed drugs that went into shortage during the five-year period from to and found that quality problems were responsible for the shortages 62 percent of the time.

However, because of the limitations of available data, we cannot assess the extent of U.