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After a five-year downturn, cautious optimism is taking hold among API manufacturers.
 The mood among exhibitors at this year’s Informex trade show in Las Vegas was the brightest it has been in several years.Although 2005 looks like it will deliver slight improvement from the ugliness of the first years of the decade, manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are looking for a return to real profitability in 2006. The optimism is a reflection of the general strong performance throughout the contract services industry. In a classic case of “a rising tide raising all ships,” the entire industry is being buoyed by an apparent flood of new candidates hitting late-phase development.Clinical CROs reported that fourthquarter 2004 contract signings for Phase II and III studies were at near-record levels.

In this time of liability reform, pharma deserves the chance to align its economice sell medicine. It’s a simple sentence, but let’s parse it, anyway. We, of course, are a heterodox, heterogeneous collection of corporations and flesh-and-blood human beings, of many faiths, and many nationalities. We have various competencies, blind spots, prejudices, and shining virtues. Sell is what we do. Yes, we develop new medicines and test them. In the end, though, we sell. Medicine is the object, the goal. The word describes the products we pour by the billions into bottles and vials; it is also our discipline, a culture devoted to healing the sick. Sell has consumers and “caveat emptor.”Medicine has patients and the Hippocratic Oath. The two words reflect the two fundamental cultures in our industry.And the tension between them brings us to this month’s consideration of tort reform. interests with its ethical obligations to the patient.

As USP prepares for its quinquennial conference in March, stakeholders in USP activities are invited to acquaint themselves with the issues and opportunities offered by the event.

The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) was founded in 1820 by practitioners who met in the young nation’s capital to devise ways to ensure the quality of therapeutic products used in medicine. To keep the USP current through the rest of the nineteenth century, authorized practitioners met at 10-year intervals to update and republish the book.