Biologicals

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Products obtained from living organisms intended for therapeutic use in medicine
2. Compounds sourced from biological materials utilized in healthcare applications
3. Therapeutic agents created from living sources used to treat diseases

Etymology: "Biological" originally described anything connected with living organisms. In medicine, the adjective came to mean treatments made from living sources, such as vaccines, antitoxins, and blood-derived products, which are manufactured from organisms or their parts rather than synthesised chemically. The term was then used as a noun, and its plural now names that whole category of products. The building blocks are Greek. "Bios" means "life," and "logos" means "study" or "discourse," so "biology" is literally the study of life. The adjective adds the suffix "-ical," which turns the noun into a description of anything related to that study. The medical noun keeps the broad sense of "living" but narrows it to a class of manufactured products, which is why it sounds more technical than its parts suggest.

Synonyms: organisms, life forms