Because many pharmaceuticals target enzymes which are specific for a particular enantiomer, compounds intended for patient administration must be of a high optical purity.
Predicting organic crystal structures is important to academic and industrial science, particularly for pharmaceuticals and pigments, where understanding polymorphism is beneficial.
These numbers are strictly arbitrary numbers that were deemed to be sufficiently long to provide incentive for research based pharmaceuticals companies to develop new drugs.
They are not manufactured locally and the costs of setting up local manufacturing facilities would be prohibitive, given the regulations surrounding pharmaceuticals.
