Disparity between scientific accomplishment and biotechnology availability in Brazil

Despite being among the world's leaders in scientific output, Brazil ranks 66th among countries in the production of reagents and supplies needed for state-of-the-art scientific analyses. The production of needed reagents and equipment for experimental analyses and patient diagnostics is sorely lacking within Brazil and explicit in this pandemic period caused by SARS-CoV-2. A significant fraction of resources from Brazilian funding agencies is now being transferred to companies in other countries for the purchase of essential scientific-related products. Is this sustainable? Therefore it is necessary to draw the attention of all the world and Brazilian society about this situation.

Urgent lessons from COVID 19: why the world needs a standing, coordinated system and sustainable financing for global research and development

The research and development (R&D) ecosystem has evolved over the past decade to include pandemic infectious diseases, building on experience from multiple recent outbreaks. Outcomes of this evolution have been particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic with accelerated development of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, as well as novel clinical trial designs. These products were developed, trialled, manufactured, and authorised for use in several countries within a year of the pandemic's onset. Many gaps remain, however, that must be bridged to establish a truly efficient and effective end-to-end R&D preparedness and response ecosystem. Foremost among them is a global financing system. In addition, important changes are required for multiple aspects of enabling sciences and product development. For each of these elements we identify priorities for improved and faster functionality. There will be no better time than now to seriously address these needs, however difficult, as the ravages of COVID-19 continue to accelerate with devastating health, social, and economic consequences for the entire community of nations.

Can fund shareholding inhibit insufficient R&D input?--Empirical evidence from Chinese listed companies

Based on the principal-agent theory and the financial management theory, this study analyzes the impact of fund shareholding on corporate insufficient R&D input, and explores the action mechanism of fund shareholding on corporate innovation activities. The results show that fund shareholding is helpful to inhibit the insufficient R&D input. Moreover, this inhibiting effect is mainly reflected in the case of higher risk of financial failure. The further analyses show that the higher level of marketization strengthens the inhibiting effect of fund shareholding on insufficient R&D input. Finally, it is suggested that fund companies should be encouraged to hold shares of listed companies, and the proposal power of fund companies in the shareholders’ meeting should be appropriately enhanced. And it is suggested that the regulators continue to promote the development of securities investment funds, and guide fund shareholding to play an active role in external governance. Also, it is suggested that the regulators promote the process of regional marketization, to strengthen the positive effect of fund shareholding on innovation activities.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Future of Science Careers

As COVID-19 swept across the world, it created a global pandemic and an unpredictable and challenging job market. This article discusses the future of the 2020-2021 job market in both academia and industry in the midst and aftermath of this pandemic.

Turning the tide of parachute science

Parachute science is the practice whereby international scientists, typically from higher-income countries, conduct field studies in another country, typically of lower income, and then complete the research in their home country without any further effective communication and engagement with others from that nation. It creates dependency on external expertise, does not address local research needs, and hinders local research efforts. As global hotspots of marine biodiversity, lower-income nations in the tropics have for too long been the subject of inequitable and unfair research practices¹. However, to date there has been little quantifiable evidence of this phenomenon in marine science. Here, we provide evidence through systematic literature searches and queries that parachute science practices are still widespread in marine research and make some recommendations to help change the current status quo. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Understanding and investing in healthcare innovation and collaboration

PURPOSE

To understand the partnership between clinicians and academics who come together to provide high-quality care alongside research and innovation, identifying challenges and productive conditions for innovation and collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

An explorative action research methodology was adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 clinical, academic and executive leads at a large metropolitan tertiary care hospital with an academic health services portfolio in the UK.

FINDINGS

Clinical leaders recognise the division of limited resource, restrictive employment contracts and the divergent priorities of each organisation as challenges hindering the collaborative process and derailing innovation. Developing a culture of respect, valuing and investing in individuals and allowing time and space for interaction help facilitate successful innovation and collaboration. Successfully leading collaborative innovation requires a combination of kindness, conviction and empowerment, alongside the articulation of a vision and accountability.

RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS

Action research continues at this site, and further enquiry into the experiences, challenges and solutions of non-leaders when collaborating and innovating will be captured to present views across the organisation.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Clinical and academic collaboration and innovation are essential to the continued success of healthcare. To ensure hospitals can continue to facilitate this in increasingly challenging circumstances, they must ensure longevity and stability of teams, devote time and resource to research and innovation, nurture interpersonal skills and develop kind and empowering leaders.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

This work uniquely focuses on a real-time collaborative and innovative development. By employing action research while this development was happening, we were able to access the real time views of those at the centre of that collaboration. We offer insight into the challenges and effective solutions that consultant-level clinical leaders encounter when attempting to innovate and collaborate in practice.

Pay for performance, satisfaction and retention in longitudinal crowdsourced research

In the social and cognitive sciences, crowdsourcing provides up to half of all research participants. Despite this popularity, researchers typically do not conceptualize participants accurately, as gig-economy worker-participants. Applying theories of employee motivation and the psychological contract between employees and employers, we hypothesized that pay and pay raises would drive worker-participant satisfaction, performance, and retention in a longitudinal study. In an experiment hiring 359 Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers, we found that initial pay, relative increase of pay over time, and overall pay did not have substantial influence on subsequent performance. However, pay significantly predicted participants' perceived choice, justice perceptions, and attrition. Given this, we conclude that worker-participants are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, having relatively low power to negotiate pay. Results of this study suggest that researchers wishing to crowdsource research participants using MTurk might not face practical dangers such as decreased performance as a result of lower pay, but they must recognize an ethical obligation to treat Workers fairly.

A Market Shaping Approach for the Biopharmaceutical Industry: Governing Innovation Towards the Public Interest

Enhancing research and development and ensuring equitable pricing and access to cutting-edge treatments are both vital to a biopharmaceutical innovation system that works in the public interest. However, despite delivering numerous therapeutic advances, the existing system suffers from major problems: a lack of directionality to meet key needs, inefficient collaboration, high prices that fail to reflect the public contribution, and an overly-financialized business model.

Funding for cancer research by an Indian funding agency, DBT

Cancer is a group of diseases with major societal impact and accounts for approximately 55 percent of mortality in India. The Indian population is increasing in size and gradually ageing. As a result, the number of people diagnosed with and dying of cancer are increasing. Government funding agencies such as the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has a clear definitive role in the management and control of cancer. Through Research and Development programs and multi-institutional networking programs, DBT has provided resources to individual investigators and to institutions, to carry out basic, applied, translational and clinical research and to develop new methods to prevent and treat disease and to conduct research especially in challenging areas pertaining to different types of cancer. This article summarizes the funding provided by DBT for different cancer research programs.

HIV Vaccine Development: 35 Years of Experimenting in the Funding of Biomedical Research

Funding vaccine development research is more complicated than simply putting out an announcement of funds available. The funders must decide whether product development can be accomplished by purely applied research, or whether more fundamental knowledge is needed before product development can be started. If additional basic knowledge is needed, identifying the specific area of the knowledge gap can be a challenge. Additionally, when there appears to be a clear path of applied research sometimes obstacles are encountered that require a return to more basic work. After deciding on the work to be done, funders must attract the scientists with the broad range of needed skills to cover all the stages of development. Collaborations must be promoted and alliances with other funders and industry must be developed. Funders use multiple tools and strategies to accomplish these tasks with varying success.

Publication rates of research projects of an internal funding program of a university medical center in Germany: A retrospective study (2004-2013)

Objectives

Non-publication and publication bias are topics of considerable importance to the scientific community. These issues may limit progress toward the 3R principle for animal research, promote waste of public resources, and generate biased interpretations of clinical outcomes. To investigate current publishing practices and to gain some understanding of the extent to which research results are reported, we examined publication rates of research projects that were approved within an internal funding program of the Faculty of Medicine at a university medical center in Germany, which is exemplary for comparable research funding programs for the promotion of young researchers in Germany and Europe.

Methods

We analyzed the complete set (n = 363) of research projects that were supported by an internal funding program between 2004 and 2013. We divided the projects into four different proposal types that included those that required an ethics vote, those that included an animal proposal, those that included both requirements, and those that included neither requirement.

Results

We found that 65% of the internally funded research projects resulted in at least one peer-reviewed publication; this increased to 73% if other research contributions were considered, including abstracts, book and congress contributions, scientific posters, and presentations. There were no significant differences with respect to publication rates based on (a) the clinic/institute of the applicant, (b) project duration, (c) scope of funding or (d) proposal type.

Conclusion

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore publication rates associated with early-career medical research funding. As >70% of the projects ultimately generated some form of publication, the program was overall effective toward this goal; however, non-publication of research results is still prevalent. Further research will explore the reasons underlying non-publication. We hope to use these findings to develop strategies that encourage publication of research results.

Could early tweet counts predict later citation counts? A gender study in Life Sciences and Biomedicine (2014-2016)

In this study, it was investigated whether early tweets counts could differentially benefit female and male (first, last) authors in terms of the later citation counts received. The data for this study comprised 47,961 articles in the research area of Life Sciences & Biomedicine from 2014-2016, retrieved from Web of Science's Medline. For each article, the number of received citations per year was downloaded from WOS, while the number of received tweets per year was obtained from PlumX. Using the hurdle regression model, I compared the number of received citations by female and male (first, last) authored papers and then I investigated whether early tweet counts could predict the later citation counts received by female and male (first, last) authored papers. In the regression models, I controlled for several important factors that were investigated in previous research in relation to citation counts, gender or Altmetrics. These included journal impact (SNIP), number of authors, open access, research funding, topic of an article, international collaboration, lay summary, F1000 Score and mega journal. The findings showed that the percentage of papers with male authors in first or last authorship positions was higher than that for female authors. However, female first and last-authored papers had a small but significant citation advantage of 4.7% and 5.5% compared to male-authored papers. The findings also showed that irrespective of whether the factors were included in regression models or not, early tweet counts had a weak positive and significant association with the later citations counts (3.3%) and the probability of a paper being cited (21.1%). Regarding gender, the findings showed that when all variables were controlled, female (first, last) authored papers had a small citation advantage of 3.7% and 4.2% in comparison to the male authored papers for the same number of tweets.

Global health research partnerships in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This themed issue on global health research has come at an opportune time in the middle of the ongoing global public health crisis arising from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic which has claimed nearly 756,000 lives in 210 countries and territories around the world as of August 15, 2020. The public health crisis underscores the importance of global health research partnerships and collaborations to develop and evaluate the requisite health technologies to assist in containing COVID-19, other diseases, and health-related concerns that defy national borders. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the member countries of the United Nations in September 2015, provide a framework for global development efforts including global health research. SDG3, which promotes health and well-being for the world populations across the age spectrum, highlights disease areas for special focus which can be adapted in specific global health research programs to serve local health needs. SDG17 promotes partnerships between high income (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC) for sustainable and equitable global development. However, given the wide disparities in fiscal and overall capacity for research between researchers in HIC and their counterparts in LMIC as well as the greater vulnerabilities of the LMIC communities when serving as research locations, a spotlight on the nature of such global health research partnerships in the context of the SDGs is desirable. This is to ensure that they are meaningful and mutually-beneficial partnerships which address local health concerns and promote long-term value for the communities involved. The objective of this commentary is, therefore, to provide a brief overview of the SDGs by way of context; explore the power differences at play when researchers from HIC are seeking research opportunities in LMIC; examine the social determinants of health and the disproportionate burden of global diseases carried by populations in LMIC to establish their vulnerability; discuss global research partnerships; and attempt to make a case for why community-based participatory research may be the preferred type of global health research partnership in the context of the SDGs.

Re-thinking the main goals of biological sciences: is it possible to build new knowledge without fundamental research?

Relationships between collective scientific knowledge and country's economic prosperity and competitiveness have been described. Hence, interaction between industry and academic institutions is seen as a way to valorize this knowledge at social and economic levels. The ability to translate scientific knowledge in social and economic benefits is now receiving most of the funding for public research. However, and despite the evident long-term benefits of funding applied science, drastic reduction of budget for fundamental research may eventually lead to the opposite outcome.

The use of H-index to assess research priorities in poultry diseases

Identifying which diseases represent a priority is crucial to optimize resources for diagnostics, control, and prevention. Here, the impact of 111 poultry pathogens belonging to Viruses (n = 31), Bacteria (n = 33), and Other (n = 47) was assessed using the H-index. The overall mean H-indexes suggested that poultry Viruses have statistically greater impact than Bacteria, which in turn are statistically more relevant than Others. Among the 20 highest H-indexes, 45% were zoonotic, and almost a third was Office International des Epizooties-listed. Avian influenza virus (H-index 127), Salmonella enteritidis and Salmonella typhimurium (H-index 72), and Eimeria spp (H-index 70) ranked the highest in Virus, Bacteria, and Other, respectively. Pathogens that produce overt clinical diseases and economic damage, cause immunosuppression, and/or are zoonotic had the highest H-index scores. The evolution of citations of particular pathogens reflected severe poultry outbreaks and/or zoonotic outbreaks in relatively wide geographic areas. Also, the evolution of citations based on taxonomic groups mirrored major changes in poultry production practices and management throughout history. Thus, Others were the most cited pathogens until the 1970s and, following 3 decades of unpopularity because of widespread use of intensive production practices, regained importance in the 2000s thanks to welfare regulation changes. Citations for Bacteria increased especially from the 1990s onward, probably because of the ban of growth promoters in western countries and the need to find new control methods for bacterial and protozoal infections. In general, countries with the greatest poultry production and research budgets had higher research production, that is the United States of America (USA) and China. Interestingly, the United Kingdom was among the top research producers despite falling behind other countries in poultry production and research budget. Moreover, the USA exhibited the strongest poultry research production based on number and diversity of publications (Dcos-index). In conclusion, the H-index could be a valid, simple tool to prioritize funding or interest in poultry diseases, especially when used as a preliminary selection approach in combination with other metrics.

[How much does research and development of a drug cost? A call for more transparency]

The cost of research and development (R&D) for a new medicine is an essential element in the debate about fair prices. In a recent study, we estimated R&D costs at an average of around 1.1 billion euro per drug; that is a lot of money, but more than 50% lower than the usual estimate of 2.4 billion euro. There is a need for more transparency about R&D costs, so that proposed prices for medicines can be better assessed on their fairness.

[Pharmaceutical pricing; what is reasonable?]

The ultimate aim of investigations into the costs of research and development (R&D) is to inform societal discussions on drug affordability. The premise is that knowing R&D costs will help when setting 'reasonable' drug prices. While high R&D costs may explain why prices are high, these costs need not justify paying those prices when health gains are limited. Value-based pricing models that explicitly take health gains into account also have limitations, most notably that they ignore R&D costs and consider prices to be 'reasonable' simply because other high costs of care can be avoided. Both cost-based and value-based pricing models are necessary to determine whether prices are reasonable; however, redesigning the drug innovation ecosystem could bring a more relevant contribution to reasonable drug prices than evaluation of the reasonableness of the price.

Optimal Allocation of Research Funds under a Budget Constraint

Purpose. Health economic evaluations that include the expected value of sample information support implementation decisions as well as decisions about further research. However, just as decision makers must consider portfolios of implementation spending, they must also identify the optimal portfolio of research investments. Methods. Under a fixed research budget, a decision maker determines which studies to fund; additional budget allocated to one study to increase the study sample size implies less budget available to collect information to reduce decision uncertainty in other implementation decisions. We employ a budget-constrained portfolio optimization framework in which the decisions are whether to invest in a study and at what sample size. The objective is to maximize the sum of the studies' population expected net benefit of sampling (ENBS). We show how to determine the optimal research portfolio and study-specific levels of investment. We demonstrate our framework with a stylized example to illustrate solution features and a real-world application using 6 published cost-effectiveness analyses. Results. Among the studies selected for nonzero investment, the optimal sample size occurs at the point at which the marginal population ENBS divided by the marginal cost of additional sampling is the same for all studies. Compared with standard ENBS optimization without a research budget constraint, optimal budget-constrained sample sizes are typically smaller but allow more studies to be funded. Conclusions. The budget constraint for research studies directly implies that the optimal sample size for additional research is not the point at which the ENBS is maximized for individual studies. A portfolio optimization approach can yield higher total ENBS. Ultimately, there is a maximum willingness to pay for incremental information that determines optimal sample sizes.

Short and long term impacts of COVID-19 on the pharmaceutical sector

Background

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was characterized as a global pandemic by the WHO on March 11th, 2020. This pandemic had major effects on the health market, the pharmaceutical sector, and was associated with considerable impacts; which may appear in short and long-term time-horizon and need identification and appropriate planning to reduce their socio-economic burden.

Objectives

Current short communication study assessed pharmaceutical market crisis during the COVID-19 era; discussing short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic on the pharmaceutical sector.

Results

Short-term impacts of COVID-19 pandemic includes demand changes, regulation revisions, research and development process changes and the shift towards tele-communication and tele-medicine. In addition, industry growth slow-down, approval delays, moving towards self-sufficiency in pharm-production supply chain and trend changes in consumption of health-market products along with ethical dilemma could be anticipated as long-term impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on pharmaceutical sector in both global and local levels.

Conclusion

The pandemic of COVID-19 poses considerable crisis on the health markets, including the pharmaceutical sector; and identification of these effects, may guide policy-makers towards more evidence-informed planning to overcome accompanying challenges.

Graphical abstract

Evidencing the impact of cancer trials: insights from the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework

INTRODUCTION

An impactful clinical trial will have real-life benefits for patients and society beyond the academic environment. This study analyses case studies of cancer trials to understand how impact is evidenced for cancer trials and how impact evaluation can be more routinely adopted and improved.

METHODS

The United Kingdom (UK) Government allocates research funding to higher-education institutions based on an assessment of the institutions' previous research efforts, in an exercise known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF). In addition to each institution's journal publications and research environment, for the first time in 2014, allocation of funding was also dependent on an evaluation of the wider, societal impact of research conducted. In the REF2014, impact assessment was performed by evaluation of impact case studies. In this study, case studies (n = 6637) submitted by institutions for the REF2014 were accessed and those focussing on cancer trials were identified. Manual content analysis was then used to assess the characteristics of the cancer trials discussed in the case studies, the impact described and the methods used by institutions to demonstrate impact.

RESULTS

Forty-six case studies describing 106 individual cancer trials were identified. The majority were phase III randomised controlled trials and those recruiting patients with breast cancer. A list of indicators of cancer trial impact was generated using the previous literature and developed inductively using these case studies. The most common impact from a cancer trial identified in the case studies was on policy, in particular citation of trial findings in clinical guidelines. Impact on health outcomes and the economy were less frequent and health outcomes were often predicted rather than evidenced. There were few descriptions identified of trialists making efforts to maximise trial impact.

DISCUSSION

Cancer trial impact narratives for the next REF assessment exercise in 2021 can be improved by evidencing actual rather than predicted Impact, with a clearer identification of the beneficiaries of cancer trials and the processes through which trial results are used. Clarification of the individuals responsible for performing impact evaluations of cancer trials and the provision of resources to do so needs to be addressed if impact evaluation is to be sustainable.

Computing the Expected Value of Sample Information Efficiently: Practical Guidance and Recommendations for Four Model-Based Methods

Value of information (VOI) analyses can help policy makers make informed decisions about whether to conduct and how to design future studies. Historically a computationally expensive method to compute the expected value of sample information (EVSI) restricted the use of VOI to simple decision models and study designs. Recently, 4 EVSI approximation methods have made such analyses more feasible and accessible. Members of the Collaborative Network for Value of Information (ConVOI) compared the inputs, the analyst's expertise and skills, and the software required for the 4 recently developed EVSI approximation methods. Our report provides practical guidance and recommendations to help inform the choice between the 4 efficient EVSI estimation methods. More specifically, this report provides: (1) a step-by-step guide to the methods' use, (2) the expertise and skills required to implement the methods, and (3) method recommendations based on the features of decision-analytic problems.

Competition and private R&D investment

We investigate the determinants of the sign of Research and Development reaction functions of rival firms. Using a two-stage n-firm Cournot competition game, we show that this sign depends on four types of environments in terms of product rivalry and technology spillovers. We test the predictions of the model on the world’s largest manufacturing corporations. Assuming that firms make R&D investments based on the R&D effort of the representative rival company, we develop a dynamic panel data model that accounts for the endogeneity of the decision of the rival firm. Empirical results thoroughly corroborate the validity of the theoretical model.

Strategies for Heterogeneous R&D Alliances of In Vitro Diagnostics Firms in Rapidly Catching-Up Economies

Most developed countries already have high-quality in vitro diagnostic (IVD) techniques for diseases, but developing countries often do not have access to these technologies and cannot afford them. Enabling firms to leverage external resources to optimize their research and development (R&D) performance has become one of the most critical issues for small and medium-sized late-coming IVD firms. R&D alliances, especially heterogeneous alliances, are necessary for releasing the resource limitations of late-coming small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and reaching the metaoptimum of the R&D performances. However, to the authors’ knowledge, a few, if any, previous studies have investigated the key success factors and strategies of heterogeneous alliances in the IVD industry. Therefore, the authors aim to define the critical factors for evaluating and selecting strategies for heterogeneous alliances in the IVD industry. A Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL)-based analytic network process (DANP) was proposed to prioritize the weights associated with the evaluation criteria. Then, a heterogeneous R&D alliance strategy was derived from the compromise ranking based on the modified VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method. An empirical study of major Taiwanese IVD firms’ evaluation and selection of heterogeneous R&D alliance strategies will be used to reveal the practicability of the analytic framework. Based on the analytic results, the joint venture strategy is the most suitable heterogeneous R&D alliance strategy for IVD firms in rapidly catching-up economies. These results can serve as the basis for heterogeneous R&D alliance strategy definitions in the IVD industry in the future.