EN
Pharmaceutical biotechnology is 60 years old. Its development one can divide into three essential periods. Two of them have proceeded in past century. The first period started during the Second Warld War with the industrial production of penicillin and was microbiology-based (microbial metabolites as drugs). The second one was genetic engineering-based and started in 1982, when human insulin synthesized in recombinant bacteria was introduced by pharmaceutical industry to health care. The third period began in 2001 with the first descriptions of the human genome, and is genome-based (also proteome-based). Molecular biology with its new areas genomics, farmacogenomics and proteomics, together with bioinformatics and other sophfisticated tools developed at the end of XX century and introduced (the pharmaceutical and medical biotechnology of the XXI century) very new ideas and new approaches to drug discovery and designin. Pharmaceutical biotechnology (as well as pharmaceutical industry as a whole and world biotechnology as a whole) is entering upon the third phase of its development, a very integrated and globalized one.