Innovation pathways

Innovation is extremely important to any company, as it is the key to growth. Internally it can invigorate the whole structure of the company and is a strong motivator to employees. Externally, without innovation a company s product line stagnates, its customers become dissatisfied and eventually the business dies. 

The innovation process involves three basic steps. 

The translation step involves the development of products and processes, whilst commercialisation involves the implementation of an innovation in a form acceptable to the identified market and then its diffusion to other areas. These aspects are covered in much greater detail in Section D. 

All R D Managers should recognise that innovation within commercial companies is not restricted to the R D function. Indeed in the most effective companies, innovation is integral to the activities of staff in all the functional components. 

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For many years creativity and innovation was achieved in a rather ad hoc manner, only engaging those parts of the organisation as they were required, often in a linear way as this was seen as a logical progression. The more successful companies realised that this was inefficient. Blocks in the innovation pathway were only cleared as they appeared and often this lead to a resistance to change, particularly from those not involved from the start in the process of innovation. 

Figure 22 shows one of the resulting pathways, which involves the use of glyoxylate as an intermediate to bypass one of the nonfunctional steps. The pathway also includes conversion of malate to fumarate (which is the direction opposite to that normally used by microorganisms) and subsequent conversion of fumarate into aspartate and on to lysine. The use of the latter step is the key to the existence of this innovative pathway. 

Covalent synthesis of complex molecules involves the reactive assembly of many atoms into subunits with aid of reagents and estabUshed as well as innovative reaction pathways. These subunits are then subjected to various reactions that will assemble the target molecule. These reaction schemes involve the protection of certain sensitive parts of the molecule while other parts are being reacted. Very complex molecules can be synthesized in this manner. A prime example of the success of this approach is the total synthesis of palytoxin, a poisonous substance found in marine soft corals (35). Other complex molecules synthesized by sequential addition of atoms and blocks of atoms include vitamin potentially anticancer KH-1 adenocarcinoma antigen,... 

Pratt [43] made the innovative suggestion that transition pathways could be determined by maximizing the cumulative transition probability connecting the known reactant and product states. That is, the most probable transition pathways would be expected to be those with the largest conditional probability. 

Innovations for the Drug Development Pathway What Is Needed Now... 

Corma, A., and Sauvanaud, L. Increasing LCO Yield and Quality in the FCC Cracking Pathways Analysis. In Fluid Catalytic Cracking VII Materials, Methods and Process Innovations. Edited by M. L. OccelU, 41-54. Amsterdam Elsevier, 2006. 

The measure we have recently developed in some detail is the number of NCEs taken into human testing. This is a valid and useful measure since it represents a firm s decision that a compound is worthy of further testing and investment. It also represents the first appearance of innovative output outside a firm, and in the U.S. it marks the entry of a compound into the regulatory pathway. Although, as described above, this measure of innovation is made before a compound s therapeutic properties are known, it is made at a point when the compound s pharmacologic and toxicologic properties are already defined. 

To measure innovation we examined the rate of flow of NCEs into human testing, the earliest point at which reliable information appears outside the pharmaceutical industry and the point at which NCEs enter the regulatory pathway. The rates at which these compounds pass the milestones of the U.S. regulatory pathway (the points of IND filing, NDA submission, and NDA approval) were defined. In addition to the overall analysis, the data were analyzed by individual therapeutic areas. The observed differences between categories of NCEs imply the existence of scientific, industrial, and/or administrative differences between these categories. 

McCarty, D.R. Chory, J. (2000) Conservation and innovation in plant signaling pathways. Cell 103, 201-209. 

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