The pharmaceutical industry is best known for manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs which aim to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent diseases. The pharmaceutical sector represents a huge industry, with the global market valuing in at nearly one trillion U.S. dollars.

In 2017, the United States was still the largest single pharmaceutical market, generating more than 450 billion U.S. dollars of revenue. Europe was responsible for generating around 214 billion U.S. dollars. These two markets, together with Japan, Canada and Australia, form the so-called established (or developed) markets. The rest of the global pharmaceutical revenue is mainly from emerging markets which include countries like China, Russia, Brazil and India. In fact, these emerging markets show the fastest increase in pharmaceutical sales. Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent are the only world regions for which a pharmaceutical compound annual growth rate higher than 10 percent is predicted up until 2018.

Pharmaceuticals are generally classified by chemical group, by the way they work in the body (pharmacological effect), and by therapeutic use.