The fall of the innovation empire and its possible rise through open science

Revolutionising health and social care: innovative solutions for a brighter tomorrow - a systematic review of the literature

BACKGROUND

In an era marked by rapid technological advancements, changing demographics, and evolving healthcare needs, the landscape of health services has been undergoing a profound transformation. Innovation has emerged as a central force driving change in the healthcare sector, as stakeholders across the globe strive to enhance the quality, accessibility, and efficiency of healthcare services.

OBJECTIVE

Within this dynamic context, this systematic literature review explored the barriers and driving forces behind successful health service innovation.

METHODS

A comprehensive systematic literature review was conducted using the Griffith University Library search engine and databases that included PubMed, ProQuest, Web of Science, Scopus, and CINHAL. To achieve the study goal, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and the associated PRISMA checklist guided the review and reporting method.

RESULTS

Findings from this review identified a need for a universal definition of health innovation that encompasses the unique complexities and challenges within this context. In our comprehensive analysis of healthcare innovation, we have uncovered pivotal findings that underscore the indispensable nature of a well-structured framework.

CONCLUSIONS

To succeed in fostering innovation within the health and social care sectors, it is imperative to establish an overarching organisational culture that meticulously addresses the following key components: team challenges; communication and collaboration; governance goals and authentic leadership, environmental engagement; and innovation endurance. Through systematic analysis of existing literature, this review offers a definition of health innovation, covering its conceptual foundations, determinants, and barriers, and provides a framework for creating an innovative culture.

Exploring regulatory flexibility to create novel incentives to optimize drug discovery

Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development.

Open drug discovery in Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) drug discovery has focused on a set of highly studied therapeutic hypotheses, with limited success. The heterogeneous nature of AD processes suggests that a more diverse, systems-integrated strategy may identify new therapeutic hypotheses. Although many target hypotheses have arisen from systems-level modeling of human disease, in practice and for many reasons, it has proven challenging to translate them into drug discovery pipelines. First, many hypotheses implicate protein targets and/or biological mechanisms that are under-studied, meaning there is a paucity of evidence to inform experimental strategies as well as high-quality reagents to perform them. Second, systems-level targets are predicted to act in concert, requiring adaptations in how we characterize new drug targets. Here we posit that the development and open distribution of high-quality experimental reagents and informatic outputs-termed target enabling packages (TEPs)-will catalyze rapid evaluation of emerging systems-integrated targets in AD by enabling parallel, independent, and unencumbered research.

Is open science a double-edged sword?: data sharing and the changing citation pattern of Chinese economics articles

Data sharing is an important part of open science (OS), and more and more institutions and journals have been enforcing open data (OD) policies. OD is advocated to help increase academic influences and promote scientific discovery and development, but such a proposition has not been elaborated on well. This study explores the nuanced effects of the OD policies on the citation pattern of articles by using the case of Chinese economics journals. China Industrial Economics (CIE) is the first and only Chinese social science journal so far to adopt a compulsory OD policy, requiring all published articles to share original data and processing codes. We use the article-level data and difference-in-differences (DID) approach to compare the citation performance of articles published in CIE and 36 comparable journals. Firstly, we find that the OD policy quickly increased the number of citations, and each article on average received 0.25, 1.19, 0.86, and 0.44 more citations in the first four years after publication respectively. Furthermore, we also found that the citation benefit of the OD policy rapidly decreased over time, and even became negative in the fifth year after publication. In conclusion, this changing citation pattern suggests that an OD policy can be double edged sword, which can quickly increase citation performance but simultaneously accelerate the aging of articles.

Barriers to Treg therapy in Europe: From production to regulation

There has been an increased interest in cell based therapies for a range of medical conditions in the last decade. This explosion in novel therapeutics research has led to the development of legislation specifically focused on cell and gene based therapies. In Europe, the European medicines agency (EMA) designates any medicines for human use which are based on genes, tissues, or cells as advanced therapy medicinal products or advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs). In this article we discuss the hurdles to widespread adoption of ATMPs in Europe, with a focus on regulatory T cells (Tregs). There are numerous barriers which must be overcome before mainstream adoption of Treg therapy becomes a reality. The source of the cells, whether to use autologous or allogenic cells, and the methods through which they are isolated and expanded, must all meet strict good manufacturing practice (GMP) standards to allow use of the products in humans. GMP compliance is costly, with the equipment and reagents providing a significant cost barrier and requiring specialized facilities and personnel. Conforming to the regulations set centrally by the EMA is difficult, and the different interpretations of the regulations across the various member states further complicates the regulatory approval process. The end products then require a complex and robust distribution network to ensure timely delivery of potentially life saving treatments to patients. In a European market whose logistics networks have been hammered by COVID and Brexit, ensuring rapid and reliable delivery systems is a more complex task than ever. In this article we will examine the impact of these barriers on the development and adoption of Tregs in Europe, and potential approaches which could facilitate more widespread use of Tregs, instead of its current concentration in a few very specialized centers.

Target 2035 – an update on private sector contributions

Target 2035, an international federation of biomedical scientists from the public and private sectors, is leveraging ‘open’ principles to develop a pharmacological tool for every human protein.

A Conceptual Framework for Life-Cycle Health Technology Assessment

OBJECTIVES

Health technology assessment (HTA) uses evidence appraisal and synthesis with economic evaluation to inform adoption decisions. Standard HTA processes sometimes struggle to (1) support decisions that involve significant uncertainty and (2) encourage continued generation of and adaptation to new evidence. We propose the life-cycle (LC)-HTA framework, addressing these challenges by providing additional tools to decision makers and improving outcomes for all stakeholders.

METHODS

Under the LC-HTA framework, HTA processes align to LC management. LC-HTA introduces changes in HTA methods to minimize analytic time while optimizing decision certainty. Where decision uncertainty exists, we recommend risk-based pricing and research-oriented managed access (ROMA). Contractual procurement agreements define the terms of reassessment and provide additional decision options to HTA agencies. LC-HTA extends value-of-information methods to inform ROMA agreements, leveraging routine, administrative data, and registries to reduce uncertainty.

RESULTS

LC-HTA enables the adoption of high-value high-risk innovations while improving health system sustainability through risk-sharing and reducing uncertainty. Responsiveness to evolving evidence is improved through contractually embedded decision rules to simplify reassessment. ROMA allows conditional adoption to obtain additional information, with confidence that the net value of that adoption decision is positive.

CONCLUSIONS

The LC-HTA framework improves outcomes for patients, sponsors, and payers. Patients benefit through earlier access to new technologies. Payers increase the value of the technologies they invest in and gain mechanisms to review investments. Sponsors benefit through greater certainty in outcomes related to their investment, swifter access to markets, and greater opportunities to demonstrate value.

Open and Crowd-Based Platforms: Impact on Organizational and Market Performance

The aim of the research was to present the state of the art on the use of open and crowd-based platforms and the advantages in terms of business performance that emerging practices employing such technologies are able to provide. The analysis was performed by extracting information on emerging practices from the repository Business Process Framework for Emerging Technologies developed by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salerno (Italy). Contingency tables allowed analysis of the association of such practices with industry, business function, business process, and impact on performance. From the analysis of the results, many implementation opportunities emerge, mainly in manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation industries, providing benefits not only in terms of efficiency and productivity, cost reduction, and information management but also in product/service differentiation. Therefore, the research provides an overview of opportunities for organizations employing open and crowd-based platforms in order to improve market and organizational performance. Moreover, the article highlights in what specific business contexts these technologies can be mainly useful.

A model for cooperative scientific research inspired by the ant colony algorithm

Modern scientific research has become largely a cooperative activity in the Internet age. We build a simulation model to understand the population-level creativity based on the heuristic ant colony algorithm. Each researcher has two heuristic parameters characterizing the goodness of his own judgments and his trust on literature. We study how the distributions of contributor heuristic parameters change with the research problem scale, stage of the research problem, and computing power available. We also identify situations where path dependence and hasty research due to the pressure on productivity can significantly impede the long-term advancement of scientific research. Our work provides some preliminary understanding and guidance for the dynamical process of cooperative scientific research in various disciplines.