What are APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients)?
People take medicines to cure, diagnose, treat, or prevent a disease. Most medication contains a couple of ingredients. The most important one is the API, which stands for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient. This is the actual substance in the medicine that has to do the work in your body. For example, the API in Aspirin is “acetylsalicylic acid“. This API will try to fight the pain of your fever or headache. Some medicines carry the name of the API. For instance, the API of Paracetamol is “ paracetamol “. To make a pill, you’ll need more ingredients than just the API. That’s where excipients come in. These ingredients are used to give the pill, for example, volume, a sweet flavor, or a color. The term API is not only used in the pharmaceutical industry, but also in the web developers community the term API is common. For them however, it stands for “Application Programming Interface“. other examples are: ANALGESIC : aceclofenac , diclofenac potassium , diclofenac sodium , paracetamol