Big pharma at its most basic level of understanding refers to the global pharmaceutical industry. There are a lot of conspiracies and theories around the idea of this booming industry taking advantage of the average American and distributing harmful things to purposely harm people which is what Yasmina Riza plays on in the script with the Antril lawsuit.
This is not a real company, but there is another company called Synergen that made Antril. In 1992 the company was hopeful that the drug was going to make a big impact, and they were a significant player in the Biochemistry world. After Antril seemed to be positively impacting people in their 99-person test trial, they moved on to a bigger group of people, 900. During this trial, the Antril only worked about 3% better than the placebo used. Upon the failure of this trial, the company's shares dropped by 70%. After two more years of failed trials of the treatment, Synergen cut its staff in half and was purchased by its successful counterparts, Amgen in 1994 for $240 million.
Antril is a real thing! It is more commonly known in the medical world as an interleukin-1 receptor antagonist and is a real genetic therapy that was being tested to treat septic shock. In 1993, the drug was under fire when testing revealed that the drug was performing only marginally better than the placebo. By 1994 it was realized that treatment simply was not working, and would not work.