Biopharmaceuticals refer to pharmaceutical substances or drugs derived from biological sources. These drugs are increasingly being used in nearly all branches of medicine and have become one of the most effective clinical treatment modalities for a broad range of diseases, including cancers and metabolic disorders. They are produced using biotechnology techniques especially genetic engineering, hybridoma technology, recombinant human technology, gene transfer, or antibody production methods. Biopharmaceuticals are known to target only specific molecules, rarely causing the side effects associated with conventional small‐molecule drugs.
Additionally, compared with conventional drugs, they are known to exhibit high specificity and activity. The first biopharmaceutical substance approved for therapeutic use was biosynthetic human insulin made via recombinant DNA technology in 1982 under the trade name Humulin. The insulin was developed by Genentech but licensed to Eli Lilly and Company, who manufactured and marketed it starting in 1982. In India, most of the growth in Indian biopharmaceuticals is because of vaccines, compared to therapeutics and diagnostics. Indian companies manufacture an increasingly wide range of biopharmaceutical products such as recombinant insulin, recombinant hepatitis-B vaccine etc.
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