Statistics Merck

Early Clinical Development Statistics, Merck Research Laboratories, Upper Gwynedd, PA, USA Biometrics Research, Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, PA, USA... 

Merck also proposed recently an expert system called Ruggedness Method Manager for ruggedness tests of chromatographic assay methods. The system uses fractional factorial designs. Besides the factors to be examined, interactions that possibly also could be relevant have to be defined by the user. The system then calculates a design in which the main effects are not confounded with one of the specified interactions. The interpretation criterion to identify statistically significant effects is not known to the authors of this chapter. 

Several pharmaceutical companies (Merck, Sharp and Dohme Smith, Kline and French and Schering Corp.) have applied the IBM 101 electronic statistical machine to literature searching (8, p. 232 41 49, p. 240). The number of columns which may be searched simultaneously depends upon the number of punches appearing in a single column, but as many as 60 columns may be examined at one pass of the cards. The 101 is a versatile machine which cuts down the searching time as compared with the simple sorter. A similar machine called ILAS was developed for searching coded steroid structures (49, p. 447) in the U. S. Patent OflBce. 

The pharmaceutical business has always been the highest profitability sector of the CPI (Table 7.23), with 17% return on assets and 36% return on equity in 1998. Table 7.13 lists the Merck s profit margin as well as the returns on equity and assets for selected years between 1980 and 1997. Income and balance sheet statistics may be found in Table 7.14. These are very high compared to the CPI in general (see Table 7.24). The huge success of Merck enabled it to support a 1.8 billion research and development program in 1998. 

A comparison of the Merck G2 and Merck G1 plans in Table 2.4 shows a reduction in the S-aux contribution from solvents and auxiliary materials of 88%, a reduction in -kernel of 73%, and a reduction in ii-total of 88%. The difference in E-total factors is over 1800 units of waste per unit of sitagliptin prodnced. These statistics exceed the performance claims made in the citation. 

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