Review of the book “Die Pharmaindustrie” (the pharmaceutical industry)

Written by Dr. Janet Thode Posted in Think out of the box

Since I was once more browsing for new books at Amazon, I was delighted (and shocked) to see that the next edition of the book "Die Pharmaindustrie" by Dagmar Fischer and Jörg Breitenbach (currently: 4th edition from 2013, published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, ISBN: 978-3-8274-2923-0) * will soon be published in October.

Delighted, because I am generally very enthusiastic about this book and shocked, because this means I should quickly write a review of the 4th edition to describe my impressions. I have to admit, this book has been with me a little longer and I've always read individual chapters (and commented for myself) from time to time, but not devoured the entire book in one go. Now is absolutely the time to take stock ;-)

In terms of content, the book covers the full range of different topics that make the pharmaceutical industry so exciting. This includes a historical introduction and ranges from drug development, galenics, authorization, production to quality control and quality assurance. Project management, patents, marketing and economic aspects such as licenses and the new markets are also discussed. It consists of a good mix of fundamentally noteworthy information, necessary legal bases and most times many descriptive and explanatory examples.

All in all, the book is extremely informative, mostly well summarized, clearly structured and written in an understandable manner, with useful illustrations and tables. Since the different chapters are written by different authors, some repetitions occur because the content was already conveyed in a previous chapter. Likewise, some sections in some chapters are sometimes a bit digressing and could be put in a nutshell more concretely, whereas other sections are a bit too short in my opinion and should also be more illustrated. In addition, business economics knowledge is sometimes required, which makes is a bit harder for those who don’t have… Some chapters have good short summaries, others unfortunately not. A glossary would also be good, as some abbreviations were introduced at the beginning, but later on during further reading might no longer be present to the reader...

An update is useful because parts of this book (from 2013!) are of course not entirely up to date anymore, although in other aspects it was or still is very close to the pulse of its time, because it addresses i.a. the latest technologies such as PAT or principles such as lean, whose implementation I just have been able to experience since 2015 while also discovering that savings have increased enormously since 2018...

Even though I am very familiar with some areas from practical everyday work, I have refreshed others while reading this book and also got to know completely new topics that I had never encountered before. I can absolutely recommend this book to every newcomer, but also to everybody already working in the industry, to take a look beyond their own field of activity and to discover the full range.

 

* Unfortunately, this book has not yet been translated into English.