The pharmaceutical industrial has five subsectors: medicines, cosmetics, phytotherapeutics, cleaning products and medical devices. The medicine subsector consists of organisations producing, importing and selling these products. Most studies about this industry have been guided by economic interests without assessing technological aspects of production. This article was aimed at proposing a methodology for assessing and describing the medicine sector according to its technological development by using the manufacturing capability concept. The main information was taken from the Colombian Medicaments and Food Surveillance Institutes (Instituto Nacional de Vigilancia de Medicamentos y Alimentos - INVIMA) databases related to pharmaceutical plant production in Bogotá, including material transformation facilities. This study led to three characteristics being identified for defining the pharmaceutical industrys manufacturing capability: that related to the pharmacological group to which active pharmaceutical ingredients belong, that linked to specifications regarding medicines sterility and that related to the technology required for manufacturing each pharmaceutical product. An analysis of these features has thus been presented and some technologies have been identified which have not been transferred or assimilated by the organisations being studied. It was found that manufacturing capability should be considered as being an indicator of the degree of technological development in these subsectors in Colombia.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.