Challenges for Australia's Bio/Nanopharma Policies: trade deals, public goods and reference pricing in sustainable industrial renewal

Industrial renewal in the bio/nanopharma sector is important for the long term strength of the Australian economy and for the health of its citizens. A variety of factors, however, may have caused inadequate attention to focus on systematically promoting domestic generic and small biotechnology manufacturers in Australian health policy

Organ preservation surgery for laryngeal cancer

The principles of management of the laryngeal cancer have evolved over the recent past with emphasis on organ preservation. These developments have paralleled technological advancements as well as refinement in the surgical technique. The surgeons are able to maintain physiological functions of larynx namely speech, respiration and swallowing without compromising the loco-regional control of cancer in comparison to the more radical treatment modalities. A large number of organ preservation surgeries are available to the surgeon; however, careful assessment of the stage of the cancer and selection of the patient is paramount to a successful outcome. A comprehensive review of various organ preservation techniques in vogue for the management of laryngeal cancer is presented

Optimization of influenza vaccine selection

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends which strains of influenza to include in each year's vaccine to countries around the globe. The current WHO strategy attempts to match the vaccine strains with the expected upcoming epidemic strains, a strategy we refer to as the follow policy. The recently proposed antigenic distance hypothesis suggests that vaccine efficacy can be enhanced by taking into account the antigenic histories of vaccinees. To assess the potential benefit of history-based vaccination, we formulate the annual vaccine-strains selection problem as a stochastic dynamic program using the theory of shape space, which maps each vaccine and epidemic strain into a point in multidimensional space. Computational results show that a near-optimal policy can be derived by approximating the entire antigenic history by a single reduced historical strain, and then solving the multiperiod problem myopically, as a series of single-period problems. The modest suboptimality of the follow policy, together with our current inability to quantitatively link the model's objective function (a measure of cross-reactivity) with actual vaccine efficacy, leads us to recommend the continued use of the follow policy. © 2005 INFORMS.link_to_subscribed_fulltex