Pharmaceutical Executive-08-01-2006

Think you've been around a long time? When's the last time your company gave a doctor a cigarette lighter with your logo on it? Put any corks in medicine bottles lately? Can you remember the last hero shot of a pharma CEO on the cover of Time? We can. And we have the artifacts to prove it...

Is the golden age of drug development over? Fat chance. Decade-by-decade comparisons show how new medicines improve on old ones. And that's innovation.

Pharma restrictions of sales tactics vary from state to state, creating new compliance challenges.

The road forward for both public health and the industry is going to require more trust and intimacy, not less, between patients, physicians, FDA, and pharma. Patients need to see a fully functioning set of checks and balances-not what they're seeing today.

Pharma leaders (and Pharm Exec readers) reflect on the ideas and events that revolutionized the industry over the last quarter of a century--and what to watch for in the next 25.

See how well you did on Pharmaceutical Executive's 25th anniversary quiz.

In 1981, when Pharm Exec published its first issue, the pharmaceutical world was a very different place: There was no direct-to-consumer advertising, no map of the genome, no high-speed screening of millions of compounds. The process of marketing and selling drugs was discreet and nearly invisible to the public; and sales forces, by today's standards, were minuscule. The first biotechs had just launched; and the Bayh-Dole Act, passed the year before, had begun to lay the groundwork for the explosion of research-driven university spin-off companies that transformed the face of research in the 1990s.

In 1981, pharma was a more innocent industry. It stood on the brink of an AIDS epidemic that science had yet to name or understand. Hazards of generics, product lifecycles, and off-label marketing lay years ahead. There were no embryonic stem cells to fight over--nor euphemisms like "overactive bladder syndrome" and "erectile dysfunction" to ease conversations or kick off ad campaigns. Who knew what awaited us? To remember--and to reflect on what shaped modern pharma--we invite you to page through the most significant events of the past quarter century.