Assessing concentration in the monoclonal antibody innovation market: A patent-based study

BACKGROUND Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are revolutionizing healthcare treatments due to their high efficacy and relative safety, despite their cost. Since they first appeared in the late 1980s, a rapidly growing market has developed. OBJECTIVE This study aims to analyze concentration levels in the market for mAb innovations through a quantitative patent analysis. Data were analyzed using traditional concentration indicators such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and Concentration Ratio, as well as linear regression and kernel density graphs to evaluate innovation and global technology dissemination strategies. The starting point was patents associated with mAbs registered by the FDA and identified in the IQVIA database up until 2019, and supplemented by data from The Antibody Society, Purple Book, Orange Book, and FDA. RESULTS Our findings indicate that the market for mAb innovations is moderately concentrated for general patents and unconcentrated for priority patents. However, it is significantly more concentrated than the market for chemical drug innovations. The mAb patent families tend to generate more progeny patents, although they are deposited in fewer countries. Chemical drug patents spread faster. Some companies seem to be central to the development of mAbs worldwide, including Roche, PDL, City of Hope, and Celltech. Other important players in the mAb innovation market are AbbVie, Amgen, Novartis, GSK, Biogen, BMS, Regeneron, J&J, and AstraZeneca. The most relevant patents in the analysis are associated with methods and procedures to obtain mAbs, not with molecules themselves. CONCLUSION The concentration in the mAb innovation market is higher than the concentration in the market for chemical drugs innovations. Our findings also indicate that expertise in mAbs development and production is concentrated in a few countries. Additionally, our study identified that a few key players from high-income countries are driving innovation in the mAb market

Plant-human futurisms in the Australian tropics: Native grasses and the Carbon_Dating art project

The tropics have been first to suffer from the effects of unsustainable practices on land and sea. The Carbon_Dating project (2019 to 2025)—an artwork and cultural campaign designed to provoke a re-imagining of human-grass futures that builds relationships with native grasses—has worked in Far North Queensland, Australia, with two First Nations participants: Mbabaram Elder, knowledge-holder, and ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin, and Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver and artist Delissa Walker Ngadijina. Using traditional knowledge and creative works to forge new imaginaries that selectively choose or refuse those of the coloniser, the contributions of these two participants are an assertion of Indigenous relationalities in the tropics, and offer others a way of re-imagining plant-human futures in the wider world

36th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE 2025)

This study examines technology integration in teacher education programs across multiple countries, focusing on pre-service teachers' self-efficacy, attitudes, and experiences with technology integration. Data from 791 participants were collected using validated instruments such as the Technology Proficiency Survey for Educators, Stages of Adoption of Technology, Synthesis of Qualitative Evidence, and TPACK Core measure. Results demonstrated that pre-service teachers had positive attitudes and moderate self-efficacy toward educational technology integration, but these did not always align with perceived integration abilities in the classroom. A unique contribution to the field is the large international data set. The study reveals the complex nature of technology integration in teacher education globally, suggesting areas for improvement such as increasing authentic experiences and enhancing feedback mechanisms. Future research explores gender, program and country-specific variations and factors contributing to effective technology integration in diverse educational contexts

The teacher as double agent: performative compliance, allegiance and survival in the contemporary classroom

In a context of increasing complexity and with serious challenges facing contemporary schooling, teachers regularly make strategic decisions about how they engage with policy reforms and system mandates. In this paper, we deploy the notion of the teacher as a ‘double agent’. The double agent is required to performatively demonstrate allegiance to education policies and practices, which sometimes sit at odds with the teacher’s professional commitment and responsibility to students. The teacher as double agent is produced through the contradictions of subjectivity, which are always present in the enactment of teacher agency. The reflective accounts from Australian teachers shared in this paper illustrate how their enactment of double agency can be deployed as an important survival strategy, which enables them to meet the policy demands of schooling systems, while also meaningfully engaging in curriculum and relational work with the students in their care. However, the tactics of compliance, allegiance and survival used by teachers also comes at a professional and personal cost, which need to be countered by more responsive and supportive education policy reforms

Shaping the profession: Australian counselling educators' perspectives on professional identity, values, and education

Counselling educators play a major role in shaping the profession by socialising the future generations of counsellors; however, they have been subject to little research. This study explores the views and perceptions of Australian counselling educators about the counselling profession’s values, identity, and educational practices. For this qualitative study, we interviewed eight counselling educators and applied thematic analysis to develop themes. Three primary themes were developed, namely, the emphasis on the person of the therapist, the importance of quality counselling education, and the distinctiveness and credibility of the counselling profession. The counselling educators expressed core values in alignment with contemporary Australian counselling scholarship, while also noting potential threats to counsellor education and, downstream, the reputation of the profession. These threats included training institution agendas that undermined educator attempts to maintain the quality of counsellor preparation. Given the threats to quality arising from the training institutions’ own conflicts of interest, professional bodies may need to consider additional gatekeeping mechanisms for graduates entering the profession

A Three-stage Cooperative Game Model for Water Resource Allocation Under Scarcity Using Bankruptcy Rules, Nash Bargaining Solution and TOPSIS

The global water security situation is deteriorating due to unequal distribution of water resources and changing climate, leading to increased conflicts in many regions. This article proposes and develops a three-stage collaborative water resource allocation model and applies this to the Indus River basin in Pakistan, where water resources are shared by four provinces (agents): Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). The model uses bankruptcy rules, Nash bargaining theory, and TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) to allocate water resources. The model considers various factors, such as water risk and water satisfaction to achieve the best possible (most equitable and acceptable) outcome. Water allocation was conducted under three scenarios of ‘median’, ‘maximum’ and ‘low’ river flows. In the first stage of water allocation, the positive and negative ideal solutions were defined for all agents (in this case, provinces). These initial ideal solutions provided a baseline for the negotiation process. In the second stage, water allocation ratios of the four provinces Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and KPK, using the Nash bargaining solution, under the median flows were 57.61%, 29.91%, 6.24% and 6.24%. In the third stage, water allocation ratios demonstrated the reduction in the allocation for those provinces facing high risks and having high satisfaction rates. The final allocations under the median flow conditions for the four provinces were 54.92%, 28.95%, 8.50% and 7.63%, respectively. The developed three-stage water allocation model considers the multi-dimensional attributes of water resources and is expected to support the cooperation of water agents, enabling collective bargaining and group negotiation and improving the acceptability and stability of allocations

25th International Conferenc on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2024)

Nowadays, trajectory data is widely accessible and can be beneficial for various practical applications, such as location-based services, personalized recommendation, and traffic management. Despite the immense benefits in these scenarios, trajectories can reveal highly sensitive information about individuals, such as personal characteristics, movement patterns, visited locations, and social connections. Consequently, it is imperative to prioritize protecting privacy when conducting trajectory analyses. Existing privacy-preserving techniques focus on optimizing data utility but often overlook the diverse requirements for privacy preservation. To address this limitation, this paper aims to maximize both privacy and utility as a multi-objective optimization problem for Privacy-Preserving Trajectory Data Publishing (PPTDP). We propose a novel algorithm called Dynamic-Parameter Genetic Algorithm (DPGA) that utilizes the non-dominated sorting multi-objective optimization approach and genetic algorithm (GA). This algorithm designs the mutation and crossover strategies to dynamically adjust the mutation and crossover parameters and improve the solution’s quality. It also adopts a scramble mutation strategy that helps to achieve better population diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution accuracy and convergence result

Exploring Healthcare Access Challenges Among South Asian Migrants in Australia: A Mixed-Method Study

Issue Addressed: Healthcare access disparities, particularly among migrant populations, are escalating. This research focuses on exploring aspects related to healthcare access disparities in the rapidly growing South Asian communities in Australia, which bear a disproportionate burden of chronic diseases. Methods: This study employed an exploratory sequential mixed-method approach (qualitative followed by quantitative), with five focus group discussions (six to eight participants each) and an online survey (n = 460). NVivo and SPSS were used for qualitative and quantitative analysis, respectively. Results: The study participants are from South Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Thematic analysis of focus group discussions identified factors influencing healthcare service utilisation among migrants, including a preference for home remedies over doctor consultations, language barriers, limited access to relevant information, high costs of specialist and dental care, dissatisfaction with rushed doctor interactions and system-related concerns. One in six survey respondents encountered challenges in accessing timely healthcare, with the most frequently reported barriers being prolonged waiting times (72%), out-of-pocket expenses (48%), and limited awareness and availability of services (36%). Migrants with multiple chronic diseases faced the highest barriers to accessing timely healthcare (57.8%), with significantly higher odds of encountering these barriers than those with no or one chronic condition (OR = 0.436, 95% CI = 0.222–0.856). Conclusions: South Asian migrants face challenges to access affordable, timely, patient-centred healthcare. A robust collaboration between services, healthcare providers and the community is essential for sustainable solutions. So What? Reducing waiting times and language barriers, improving awareness of available services and enhancing access to affordable specialist and dental services are imperative to foster equitable healthcare outcomes for Australia's diverse population

An Engineered Heterostructured Trinity Enables Fire-Safe, Thermally Conductive Polymer Nanocomposite Films with Low Dielectric Loss

To adapt to the trend of increasing miniaturization and high integration of microelectronic equipments, there is a high demand for multifunctional thermally conductive (TC) polymeric films combining excellent flame retardancy and low dielectric constant (ε). To date, there have been few successes that achieve such a performance portfolio in polymer films due to their different and even mutually exclusive governing mechanisms. Herein, we propose a trinity strategy for creating a rationally engineered heterostructure nanoadditive (FG@CuP@ZTC) by in situ self-assembly immobilization of copper-phenyl phosphonate (CuP) and zinc-3, 5-diamino-1,2,4-triazole complex (ZTC) onto the fluorinated graphene (FG) surface. Benefiting from the synergistic effects of FG, CuP, and ZTC and the bionic lay-by-lay (LBL) strategy, the as-fabricated waterborne polyurethane (WPU) nanocomposite film with 30 wt% FG@CuP@ZTC exhibits a 55.6% improvement in limiting oxygen index (LOI), 66.0% and 40.5% reductions in peak heat release rate and total heat release, respectively, and 93.3% increase in tensile strength relative to pure WPU film due to the synergistic effects between FG, CuP, and ZTC. Moreover, the WPU nanocomposite film presents a high thermal conductivity (λ) of 12.7 W m−1 K−1 and a low ε of 2.92 at 106 Hz. This work provides a commercially viable rational design strategy to develop high-performance multifunctional polymer nanocomposite films, which hold great potential as advanced polymeric thermal dissipators for high-power-density microelectronics

Fermentation of sorghum with Aspergillus strains: A promising and sustainable pathway to enzyme production- comprehensive review

The main objective of this article is to explore the utilization of sorghum as a potential substrate to produce valuable enzymes using Aspergillus strains. It focuses on two key aspects: (i) the environmental and economic sustainability of enzyme production from sorghum ii. enhancing enzymes and biofuel production through process and host cell optimization. A comparative study is conducted among sorghum, wheat, and corn to understand the current state of knowledge and research gap on large-scale enzyme production. Sorghum is an adaptable crop with all types of environments and is overall more sustainable than wheat and corn. With its rich composition of starch (60%-75%), lignin (11%-25%), hemicellulose (18%-25%), and cellulose (25%-45%), sorghum represents itself an excellent candidate for the enzyme, and also first and second-generation biofuel production. The advantages and associated challenges of the Aspergillus strains are then discussed for enzyme production. It highlights the development of an integrated process for enzyme and bioethanol production at a low cost without relying on external carbon and nitrogen sources through an eco-friendly and economically viable approach