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The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has seen an alarming stagnation in the last two decades. This is largely due to the fact that resources and manpower that would have been part of the pharmaceutical industry have funneled the growth of the biotechnological industry. Industry optimists on the other hand have a completely different outlook of the current scenario.
They are of the opinion that for any field to succeed into the future, it needs to constantly keep evolving in ways that will completely distance it from what it used to be before. If seen closely, they might not be wrong. Since pharmaceutical education is being replaced by promising entrants such as biotechnology, it has seen its popularity diminish from previous years. Biotechnology has started to include core pharmaceutical subjects such as pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, chemical drug modifications, biopharmaceuticals, pharmacognosy and many more. The first strides of biotechnology into pharmaceuticals were seen with the discovery of penicillin from fungus and insulin from bacteria. These first steps were vital in the evolution of pharmaceutical industry. Some argue that biotechnology is the sub-field of pharmaceuticals. They might not be wrong, since major advancements in biotechnology for human health welfare have been improvements of pharmaceutical accomplishments. There is a new field known as pharmaceutical biotechnology, where drugs are designed so that they make changes at the molecular level. These drugs are directed towards the DNA, RNA, proteins, enzymes, viruses, cancer cells and such, and these drugs are going where pharmaceutical drugs dared not go before.
Further evolution of pharmaceutical education is only possible by destroying the lines between biotechnology and human medicine. Drugs are no longer foreign chemicals that alter natural chemicals, but are being designed like natural chemicals that modify the complex intracellular machinery and possibly take residence in place of the natural ones. Only by destroying these lines will further innovations in health care be possible.