Regression analysis of oncology drug licensing deal values

Thesis (S.M.)--Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, September 2006."August 2006."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-38).This work is an attempt to explain wide variations in drug licensing deal value by using regression modeling to describe and predict the relationship between oncology drug deal characteristics and their licensing deal values. Although the reasons for large variances in value between deals may not be immediately apparent, it was hypothesized that objective independent variables, such as a molecule's phase, its target market size and the size of the acquiring/licensor company could explain a significant portion of variation in cancer drug values. This model, although not predictive when used independently, could be used to supplement other discounted cash flow and market based techniques to help assess the worth of incipient oncology therapies. Using regression analysis to study drug licensing deals is not novel: a study was published by Loeffler et al in 2002 that attempted to assess the impact of multiple variables on deal value in a wide range of pharmaceutical indications. The independent variables in Loeffler's work could explain less than 50% of differences in deal values. It was expected that refining the model could lead to improved regression R squared coefficient and, potentially, be a useful tool for managers. This current work is based on the 2002 Loeffler paper, but differs significantly by: * Focusing on just oncology licensing deals instead of deals covering many indications, * Incorporating a measure of the assets of the larger licensee company, * Accounting for the licensing experience of the smaller licensor company, * Factoring in inflation and the years the deals were signed; and * Assessing the impact of primary indication market size. The goal of the thesis was to advance the art of estimating the value of drug licensing deals by assessing the impact of the aforementioned factors.by Paul Allen Hawkins.S.M

Durham - a word sense disambiguation system

Ever since the 1950's when Machine Translation first began to be developed, word sense disambiguation (WSD) has been considered a problem to developers. In more recent times, all NLP tasks which are sensitive to lexical semantics potentially benefit from WSD although to what extent is largely unknown. The thesis presents a novel approach to the task of WSD on a large scale. In particular a novel knowledge source is presented named contextual information. This knowledge source adopts a sub-symbolic training mechanism to learn information from the context of a sentence which is able to aid disambiguation. The system also takes advantage of frequency information and these two knowledge sources are combined. The system is trained and tested on SEMCOR. A novel disambiguation algorithm is also developed. The algorithm must tackle the problem of a large possible number of sense combinations in a sentence. The algorithm presented aims to make an appropriate choice between accuracy and efficiency. This is performed by directing the search at a word level. The performance achieved on SEMCOR is reported and an analysis of the various components of the system is performed. The results achieved on this test data are pleasing, but are difficult to compare with most of the other work carried out in the field. For this reason the system took part in the SENSEVAL evaluation which provided an excellent opportunity to extensively compare WSD systems. SENSEVAL is a small scale WSD evaluation using the HECTOR lexicon. Despite this, few adaptations to the system were required. The performance of the system on the SENSEVAL task are reported and have also been presented in [Hawkins, 2000]

Application of air flow measurements to the determination of cotton fiber specific surface area and maturity

An instrumentation system and measurement techniques were developed to determine if the relationships for specific surface area and maturity used with the Arealometer were applicable to a system using a larger specimen size and random fiber orientation. Air flow resistance was determined for various varieties with a wide range of specific surface area and maturity. Fiber orientation effects were found to be negligible and the optimum specimen plug lengths and air flow rate were determined. It was concluded that the Arealometer flow equation performed satisfactorily with the experimental system, providing compatible specific surface area values and indications of maturity

Diversity For Nonprofits: Mission Drift Or Mission Fulfillment?

Nonprofit stewardship imposes two special duties.  As stewards of donative resources, nonprofits must fulfill their programmatic mandates.  As stewards of public benefit, they must also be responsive to pressing social issues that transcend organizational confines.  This paper examines the tension nonprofit leaders encounter when, in response to the latter duty, some stakeholders push for an organizational diversity initiative, while other stakeholders, in response to the former duty, claim organizational diversity initiatives trigger mission drift.  Drawing upon an interdisciplinary theoretical palette, this article proposes a conceptual way to reconcile a tightly constructed nonprofit mission with a broader calling to mitigate the degenerative effects of historically embedded identity hierarchies

Who's Getting Cited: Representation of Women and Non-White Scholars in Major American Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals Between 1986-2005

This article presents findings from an ongoing study of the integration of women and non-white scholarship into the discipline of criminology and criminal justice. The most-cited women and non-white scholars in six major American journals were determined for 1986–2005 to investigate (1) if the dissemination of published research findings in criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) is affected by gender and race/ethnicity and (2) if changes in scholarly influence of women and non-white scholars in CCJ over 20 years exists. A number of explanations are suggested to account for gender and racial differentials in citation rates

Creating Digital Editions: An Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

Materials from a workshop held Saturday, November 17, 2012.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/1/2012-11-17_welcome.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/2/tei-in-the-wild.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/3/doc_analysis.htmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/4/doc_samples.htmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/5/encoding_exercise_1.ziphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/6/tei-header-slides.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/7/2012-11-17_recipes.ziphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/8/2012-11-17_how_to_publish.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/9/2014-01-17_whitman.ziphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/10/pfs_talk2.htmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/11/pfs_talk2_files.ziphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109403/12/UsingtheTEIGuidelines.pdfDescription of 2012-11-17_welcome.pdf : Welcome and computer set up slideDescription of tei-in-the-wild.pdf : Introduction to XML/TEI slidesDescription of doc_analysis.html : Document Analysis SlideDescription of doc_samples.html : Document Analysis samplesDescription of encoding_exercise_1.zip : Exercise: TEI Encoding 1Description of tei-header-slides.pdf : Introduction to the TEI Header slidesDescription of 2012-11-17_recipes.zip : Exercise: TEI Encoding 2Description of 2012-11-17_how_to_publish.pdf : How to Publish your TEI Documents handoutDescription of 2014-01-17_whitman.zip : Exercise: TEI Encoding 3Description of pfs_talk2.html : Encoding Choices Lecture noteDescription of pfs_talk2_files.zip : Encoding Choices Lecture notes (images)Description of UsingtheTEIGuidelines.pdf : Using the TEI Guidelines handou

Discovery of distant high luminosity infrared galaxies

We have developed a method for selecting the most luminous galaxies detected by IRAS based on their extreme values of R, the ratio of 60 micron and B-band luminosity. These objects have optical counterparts that are close to or below the limits of Schmidt surveys. We have tested our method on a 1079 deg^2 region of sky, where we have selected a sample of IRAS sources with 60 micron flux densities greater than 0.2 Jy, corresponding to a redshift limit z~1 for objects with far-IR luminosities of 10^{13} L_sun. Optical identifications for these were obtained from the UK Schmidt Telescope plates, using the likelihood ratio method. Optical spectroscopy has been carried out to reliably identify and measure the redshifts of six objects with very faint optical counterparts, which are the only objects with R>100 in the sample. One object is a hyperluminous infrared galaxy (HyLIG) at z=0.834. Of the remaining, fainter objects, five are ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIGs) with a mean redshift of 0.45, higher than the highest known redshift of any non-hyperluminous ULIG prior to this study. High excitation lines reveal the presence of an active nucleus in the HyLIG, just as in the other known infrared-selected HyLIGs. In contrast, no high excitation lines are found in the non-hyperluminous ULIGs. We discuss the implications of our results for the number density of HyLIGs at z<1 and for the evolution of the infrared galaxy population out to this redshift, and show that substantial evolution is indicated. Our selection method is robust against the presence of gravitational lensing if the optical and infrared magnification factors are similar, and we suggest a way of using it to select candidate gravitationally lensed infrared galaxies.Comment: 6 pages, accepted for publication in A&