Aggregate Trends

Each new dollar spent on pharmaceutical R D is an investment in a potential stream of future revenues. Although investors make mistakes, their decisions are a true reflection of expectations about the future. The rapid increase in total industrywide pharmaceutical R D in constant dollars in the 1980s means that investors expected aggregate net revenues over the lifetimes of the new products would be sufficient to justify the additional investment with its attendant risks. 

Little more can be concluded from an examination of R D spending trends. For example, investors might or might not expect the number of drugs approved for marketing to increase in the future. The R D could be directed toward fewer products with more lucrative markets, or it could be directed to the introduction of a large number of products, each with more modest market potential. 

Some of the R D might be directed to the development of me-too drugs that do not 

R D dollars pursue returns, and the risks investors will take to obtain those returns depend on how great they promise to be. To understand the drivers behind the pharmaceutical R D phenomenon of the 1980s, it is necessary to examine closely how the returns to these investments have been changing over time. Subsequent chapters of this report examine trends in the average cost of discovering and developing new ethical pharmaceuticals and the net returns to bringing these products to market. 

11 Pioneer and me-too drugs are granted monopolies by the United States and other countries patent systems, which protect patented 

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Kopito, R. R. Aggresomes, inclusion bodies and protein aggregation. Trends Cell Biol 2000, 30, 524-30. 

And indeed had been predicted on the basis of simple aggregate trend statistics and the experience with previous target-based systems such as the UK ETS and Climate Change Agreements (Grubb et al., 2005). 

Soto C, Estrada L, CastillaJ. Amyloids, prions and the inherent infectious nature of misfolded protein aggregates. Trends. Biochem. Sci. 2006 31 150-155. 

The aggregate trends in chemistry as occupation and as profession were considered in Chapter 2. The present discussion will focus upon disaggregated trends for those three sectors of the American economy that have employed significant numbers of chemists industry, government, and academe. Some mention will also be made of the employment of chemists in other sectors. In every case, the necessary statistics are available only for widely scattered dates or for short runs of time. The varying definitions employed make the compilation of chronological series a more than usually hazardous enterprise. Nonetheless, certain indicators can be assembled. 

The current trend in analytical chemistry applied to evaluate food quality and safety leans toward user-friendly miniaturized instruments and laboratory-on-a-chip applications. The techniques applied to direct screening of colorants in a food matrix include chemical microscopy, a spatial representation of chemical information from complex aggregates inside tissue matrices, biosensor-based screening, and molec-ularly imprinted polymer-based methods that serve as chemical alternatives to the use of immunosensors. 

A recent trend in the pharmaceutical industry has been to harness the intrinsic tissue-protective properties of NO for improving the gastric tolerance of nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NS AIDs). This trend has led to the synthesis of hybrid, chimeric molecules containing an NSAID or aspirin moiety and a NO-donor functionality [153, 154]. One such hybrid is a NO-releasing derivative of aspirin, NCX-4016. In a doubleblind, randomized, placebo-controlled gastrointestinal safety assessment in healthy subjects, NCX-4016 (400 or 800 mg twice daily for 7 days) acted like aspirin as an inhibitor of arachidonic acid-induced platelet aggregation in vitro [155]. Whether... 

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