Absolute Category Rating

The attractiveness of specific product categories, as discussed in the previous section, by and large defines the attractiveness of target markets as well. Besides its absolute size, the pharmaceuticals market comes first, because of its inherent elevated added value, the relatively high innovation rate, which leads to a steady demand for new products and for a manageable number of customers. The attributes for the agro fine chemicals market are similar, albeit less pronounced, specialty chemicals, in contrast, are needed by almost all industries and, therefore, virtually cannot be approached proactively. Also, the innovation rate in terms of new chemical entities is generally rather low, except in the electronic industry. 

The absolute rate constants were determined for a variety of reactions of the solvated electron in ethanol and methanol. Three categories of reaction were investigated (a) ion-electron combination, (b) electron attachment, and (c) dissociative electron attachment. These bimolecular rate constants (3, 27, 28) are listed in Table III. The rate constants of four of these reactions have also been obtained for the hydrated electron in water. These are also listed in the table so that a comparison may be made for the four rate constants in the solvents ethanol, methanol, and water. 

It is forecast that up to the end of the current decade, the research focus regarding therapeutic mAbs will be on two categories oncology and arthritis, and inflammatory and immune disorders. A significant increase of sales is expected up to 2008 for chimeric mAbs, in absolute terms, and for human and humanized mAbs, in relative terms (Figure 16.2). Up to now, murine mAbs are those with the lowest approval rate (4.5%), whereas the chimeric are the most successful (26%). The approval rates for humanized mAbs (18%) and human antibodies (14%) were intermediate. However, as most of the last two types are still under development, the approval situation may change significantly in the future (Reichert and Pavlou, 2004). 

However, while that will produce plenty of individuals who are free of the side-effect ( 480), we would only anticipate finding 20 who do suffer it — a quite inadequate number. What we have to ensure is that we detect an acceptable number of individuals in all categories. The problem in this case is to accumulate sufficient individuals who do suffer the side-effect. We know from previous examples that (as an absolute minimum) any category with less than 50—100 observations will yield only a very imprecise estimate of the proportion. So, with a 4 per cent occurrence rate, we would have to observe 1250 patients to find 50 with the side-effect. Even having checked out over 1000 people, if we take the figures of 50 cases out of 1250, the 95 per cent Cl for the proportion with the side effect will be 2.98-5.24 per cent which is still not stunningly precise. 

Using these criteria 45 substrates for which experimental information was available for reaction at pH 7 were chosen to construct the model (Table 3). There is a significant amount of literature data for substrates of HLADH which lack information on enantiomeric excess values and absolute configurations of products and where the relative rates of reaction have been measured under different reaction conditions (e.g. pH 8.5). Substrates falling into this category (46-69, Table 4) were not used. Heterocyclic bicyclic substrates 70-73 were only used for testing. 

A number of criticisms can be made of this approach. First, it depends on the assumption that the ratio of the reporting rate for the ADE of interest to the rate for all other ADEs is the same at all doses. Second, a dose relationship may be indicative of such a relationship for other ADEs rather than in the category of interest. Third, it cannot be used to establish absolute risks. 

Swap spread volatilities for several currencies are shown in Exhibit 23.6, with values that vary from about 15 bp/year to 40 bp/year. Also shown are the resulting spread risks in the euro and sterling markets for several rating categories. We will see further below that the swap model predicts reasonably accurately both the absolute magnitude of the spread risk in each market and their relative values. 

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