Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness

The development of NICE in the UK is being watched keenly throughout the world to see if this organisation will have an indirect effect on reducing healthcare costs. There has been a perceived reduction in competitiveness in the UK pharmaceutical industry over the past few years, and to this end the ABPI and the Department of Health (DoH) established the Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force in April 2000. The first reports of the Task Force have established of the DoH Research Governance Framework, as well as further regulatory improvements complying with the EU GCP Directive. 

The Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force. Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry London, 2003 (www.abpi.org. uk 2003). 

The R D environment in the UK has been strengthened through the work of the Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Taskforce (PICTF) (49). Set up in 2000, PICTF brought together representatives from industry and government to examine the steps that could be taken to make the UK more attractive for pharmaceutical R D investment and to collect and publish annual competitiveness and performance indicators. 

Competitiveness and Performance Indicators 2002. Pharmaceutical Industry Competitiveness Task Force (PICTF), 2002 http //www.advisorvbodies.doh.gov.uk/pict pictfonevearon.htm... 

Catalysts are extensively used and have played a huge role in making bulk chemical manufacturing technology more competitive and environmentally fnendly. Undoubtedly catalysis will continue to provide the answer to many economic and environmental challenges currently faced by industry. As indicated above catalysts are now needed by the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and they need to be robust, selective, recoverable and reusable. 

Of course, saturation experiments are only possible when a radiolabeled form of the ligand of interest is available. Competition experiments, on the other hand, are particularly useful in allowing the determination of dissociation constants for unlabeled drugs which compete for the binding sites with a ligand that is available in a labeled form. This approach has been widely adopted by the pharmaceutical industry as a rapid means of determining the affinity of novel compounds for a particular receptor for which a well-characterized radioligand is available. 

Ballance, R., J. Pogan and H. Forstner (1992), The World s Pharmaceutical Industries an International Perspective on Innovation, Competition and Policy, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, US I idward 11 gar. 

Caves, R.E., M.D. Whinston and M.A. Hurwitz (1991), Patent expiration, entry, and competition in the US pharmaceutical industry , Brooking Papers on Economic Activity, 1991, 1-66. 

Danzon, P.M. (1996), The uses and abuses of international price comparisons , in R.B. Helms (ed.), Competitive Strategies in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Washington AEI Press, pp. 85-106. 

Notwithstanding the intellectual challenges posed by the subject, the main impetus behind the development of computational models for turbulent reacting flows has been the increasing awareness of the impact of such flows on the environment. For example, incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons in internal combustion engines is a major source of air pollution. Likewise, in the chemical process and pharmaceutical industries, inadequate control of product yields and selectivities can produce a host of undesirable byproducts. Even if such byproducts could all be successfully separated out and treated so that they are not released into the environment, the economic cost of doing so is often prohibitive. Hence, there is an ever-increasing incentive to improve industrial processes and devices in order for them to remain competitive in the marketplace. 

Congressional Budget Office (CBO), How increased competition from generic drugs has affected policy and returns in the pharmaceutical industry, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1998. 

Grabowski, H.G. and Vernon, ]., Prospects for returns to pharmaceutical R D under health care reform, in Competitive Strategies in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Robert Helms, Ed., AEl Press, Washington, 1996. 

In the case of glycoprotein biopharmaceuticals, the consequence of the multiple glycosylated products is the need for strict control of the manufacturing process to maintain a reproducible spectrum of products with consistent therapeutic profile. That biopharmaceuticals often contain mixtures of related products can also be advantageous to the pharmaceutical industry in warding off generic competition, due to the challenge of... 

Unlike other methods currently employed for quantitative transcript measurements, including cDNA microarrays and real-time RT-PCR, competitive RT-PCR is amenable to quality control, which is critical for clinical diagnostic and pharmaceutical industry applications. Furthermore, microarray approaches are limited to generating snap-shot like profiles, but they do not control for differences in hybridization efficiencies of different gene probes with their corresponding cDNAs. That is, cross comparisons are relative and not absolute. Real-time PCR has gained acceptance recently largely due to the reduced cost associated... 

Liquid-liquid extraction is extensively used in the pharmaceutical industry for the production of drugs and isolation of natural products [9]. These products are often heat sensitive and cannot be recovered by methods such as atmospheric distillation or evaporation. Owing to competition, little detailed information is available on current commercial operations. A classic example and the best documented, which has encountered problems... 

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