Understanding the factors that promote drug innovation is important both for improvements in health care and for the future of organizations engaged in drug discovery research and development. By identifying the inventors of 252 new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 1998 to 2007 and their places of work, and also classifying these drugs according to innovativeness, this study investigates the contribution of different types of organizations and regions to drug innovation during this period. The data indicate that drugs initially discovered in biotechnology companies or universities accounted for approximately half of the scientifically innovative drugs approved, as well as half of those that responded to unmet medical needs, although their contribution to the total number of new drugs was proportionately lower. The biotechnology companies were located mainly in the United States. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of these data and discusses potential contributing factors to the trends observed, with the aim of aiding efforts to promote drug innovation.
The findings provide strong evidence for a role of tobacco consumption and offer clues to other environmental and genetic factors involved in the process of gastric carcinogenesis.
This paper analyzes the transition to the entrepreneurial university as part of a broader shift to a knowledge-based economy, arising from a complex interplay between exogenous (top-down) and endogenous factors (bottom-up) of a more or less similar nature, combined in different ways in different countries. Drawing on the experience of four countries (US, Sweden, Japan and Brazil) with different institutional trajectories and degrees of academic entrepreneurial transformation, under varying degrees of state control and levels of university initiative, we argue that a global convergence is currently taking shape toward entrepreneurial universities playing a central role in a knowledgebased economy that moves beyond etatism and pure market relations to an intermediate position within a triple helix regime. The role of public venture capital in financing the transition to the entrepreneurial university and its possible interventions in a counter-cyclical business model, which is also active in periods of economic downturn, are also discussed.
Incidence of various cancers was evaluated in a cohort of 5359 multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, identified through hospital discharge records between 1977 and 1987 and followed for an average of 5.2 years. Computerized linkage with the Danish Cancer Registry uncovered 210 cancer cases which was significantly more than expected based on national rates (relative risk (RR) = 1.29). Over half of the excess, however, was observed for non-melanoma skin cancer and tumors of the urinary tract, which may be related to increased medical surveillance among MS patients compared to the Danish population as a whole. There was a significant excess of nasopharyngeal carcinomas in the cohort (RR = 17.3), but based on only 3 cases and seen only among women. Hematologic and lymphatic malignancies were not increased, adding little support to previous suggestions of a possible association of these malignancies with MS. An excess of brain tumors, seen only in women, may represent situations where the tumor caused symptoms which were interpreted as MS. Overall, the data suggest that a patient with MS is not at unusual risk for subsequent cancer development, but the relatively short follow-up of the population is a limitation of the investigation.
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