Who Benefits from New Medical Technologies? Estimates of Consumer and Producer Surpluses for HIV/AIDS Drugs

The social value of an innovation is comprised of the value to consumers and the value to innovators. We estimate that for the HIV/AIDS therapies that entered the market from the late 1980's onwards, innovators appropriated only 5% of the social surplus arising from these new technologies. Despite the high annual costs of these drugs to patients, the low share of social surplus going to innovators raises concerns about advocating cost-effectiveness criteria that would further reduce this share, and hence further reduce incentives for innovation.

Surplus Appropriation from R&D and Health Care Technology Assessment Procedures

Given the rapid growth in health care spending that is often attributed to technological change, many private and public institutions are grappling with how to best assess and adopt new health care technologies. The leading technology adoption criteria proposed in theory and used in practice involve so called "cost-effectiveness" measures. However, little is known about the dynamic efficiency implications of such criteria, in particular how they influence the R&D investments that make technologies available in the first place. We argue that such criteria implicitly concern maximizing consumer surplus, which many times is consistent with maximizing static efficiency after an innovation has been developed. Dynamic efficiency, however, concerns aligning the social costs and benefits of R&D and is therefore determined by how much of the social surplus from the new technology is appropriated as producer surplus. We analyze the relationship between cost-effectiveness measures and the degree of surplus appropriation by innovators driving dynamic efficiency. We illustrate how to estimate the two for the new HIV/AIDS therapies that entered the market after the late 1980's and find that only 5% of the social surplus is appropriated by innovators. We show how this finding can be generalized to other existing cost-effectiveness estimates by deriving how those estimates identify innovator appropriation for a set of studies of over 200 drugs. We find that these studies implicitly support a low degree of appropriation as well. Despite the high annual cost of drugs to patients, very low shares of social surplus may go to innovators, which may imply that cost-effectiveness is too high in a dynamic efficiency sense.

Hippocampal Infusion of Zeta Inhibitory Peptide Impairs Recent, but Not Remote, Recognition Memory in Rats.

Spatial memory in rodents can be erased following the infusion of zeta inhibitory peptide (ZIP) into the dorsal hippocampus via indwelling guide cannulas. It is believed that ZIP impairs spatial memory by reversing established late-phase long-term potentiation (LTP). However, it is unclear whether other forms of hippocampus-dependent memory, such as recognition memory, are also supported by hippocampal LTP. In the current study, we tested recognition memory in rats following hippocampal ZIP infusion. In order to combat the limited targeting of infusions via cannula, we implemented a stereotaxic approach for infusing ZIP throughout the dorsal, intermediate, and ventral hippocampus. Rats infused with ZIP 3-7 days after training on the novel object recognition task exhibited impaired object recognition memory compared to control rats (those infused with aCSF). In contrast, rats infused with ZIP 1 month after training performed similar to control rats. The ability to form new memories after ZIP infusions remained intact. We suggest that enhanced recognition memory for recent events is supported by hippocampal LTP, which can be reversed by hippocampal ZIP infusion

A Model to Detect Forest Change Relating to Mining Using Google Earth Engine Application in Belitung Island, Indonesia

© 2019 IEEE. Belitung Island is one of the biodiversity hotspots in Indonesia that is best known for its multi-use landscape, tourism, large agricultural land, tin mining and all other activities. The main earning possibility of local people of the island is most efficiently lies in coastal activities and tin mining. Main challenges are persistent cloud cover over the steep and vegetated terrain that creates a problem in forest change mapping. This research was conducted to identify and visually analyse the forest loss or gain due to tin mining activity and settlement along with the consequences of illegal logging using the Google earth engine application. Furthermore, this study will also help to understand the areas of water bodies filled after mining making it inactive. Therefore, NDVI and MNDWI analysis have been conducted to calculate the index values using the (GEE) Google earth engine and graphically presented. Landsat +ETM, MODIS global land cover, Hansen global forest change and other remote sensing data applied to conduct this research. The results obtained from this study shows that the width of forestry land cover is decreased gradually from 2012 to 2017 and the active tin mining, agricultural land, and settlement are widely increased. The inactive tin-mined areas are filled with water that can be well understood from the elevation modelling. Furthermore, the forest gain is also increasing mildly as per the results of change detection in forest gain analysis from 2012 to 2017. This clearly indicates the change of forest resulting due to the active tin mining and inactive tin-mined water filled land as well as the human settlement

Earthquake Vulnerability Assessment using Expert-based Approach in GIS

© 2019 IEEE. Several techniques of earthquake vulnerability assessment exist for the evaluation of social, economic and buildings vulnerability that has been carried out to investigate their suitability in the application of earthquake risk assessment. The primary challenge is the prediction of earthquakes that is almost seemingly impossible in the current time. The main concern is mitigation and preparedness, which is dominant for the human, animals, and environment. However, exposed assets and the determination of their fragilities/vulnerabilities are essential and will be challenging in the future for the viability and reliability during the assessment of rapid loss. Therefore, this study proposes an expert's decision-based approach for the assessment of earthquake vulnerability in Banda Aceh city, Indonesia that could help in future risk assessment on a city scale. It was analysed that the proposed method adequately satisfies all the necessary criteria that can be involved in earthquake vulnerability assessment in Banda Aceh city to reduce the earthquake impacts. The results shows that the proposed method is good for city-scale earthquake vulnerability assessment with significant consistency ratio of 0.04. This research observes the current practices involved in regional and urban earthquake vulnerability assessment

Tailoring the carrier mobility of semiconducting nanowires by remote dielectrics

The dielectric environment of thin semiconductor nanowires can affect the charge transport properties inside the wire. In this work, it is shown that Coulomb impurity scattering inside thin nanowires can be damped strongly by coating the wire with a high-k dielectric. This will lead to an increase in the mobility of free charges inside the wire.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure