Pharmaceuticals cost-utility analysis

Establishing the value of a new pharmaceutical can be done through a cost-effectiveness ratio, where the costs are compared with currently accepted therapy and the effect is expressed in natural units such as life-years gained or disability-free days. A cost-utility analysis uses QALYs as the expression of the drug s effect, which is a measure that incorporates all the outcomes as well as all the costs of the drug treatment. Such a broad-based measure captures how much improved the patient s life becomes as a result of the treatment and at what cost. Quality-adjusted life-years can be viewed as life-years gained,... 

Enantioanalysis is essential for substances with a chiral moiety from the body and pharmaceutical compounds. Utilization of EPMEs in clinical and pharmaceutical enantioanalysis improves the reliability of the analysis, shortens the time of analysis and minimizes its cost. 

Calculations of economic profitability can only be predictive in the phase of process development, before a plant is on stream for a long time. Therefore, individual components of costs and market evaluations will bear some uncertainty. This uncertainty is relatively high for pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. The impact of these uncertainties on the profitability of a process may be quantified by a sensitivity analysis. This analysis provides information about the sensitivity of the process economics to changes in parameters relevant for the profitability (investment costs, price and consumption of raw materials, utility unit costs, product value and demand, etc.), and therefore on the reliability of the result of the economic evaluation. In the early stages of process development, a high sensitivity indicates the areas requiring attention for continued R D work. 

An impressive diversity of mass analyzers are utilized in modem analytical instrumentation. An overview of the common mass spectrometer analyzers follows, with particular emphasis on linear quadrupole mass analyzers, quadrupole ion traps, and time-of-flight mass analyzers, as they arguably constitute the quantitative MS workhorses of the pharmaceutical industry. The description of alternate analyzer systems should provide a framework in which the utility of these three particular systems provides the most cost-effective analytical mass spectrometer systems for pharmaceutical analysis. 

These methods have yet to be extensively utilized in pharmaceutical analysis, primarily due to their novelty and their high cost. Lastly, atomic fluorescence spectroscopy has been largely ignored but may ultimately find use in pharmaceutical analysis due the simplicity of its design and limits of detection which are occasionally somewhat lower than with atomic absorption spectroscopy. 

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