A Critical Look at Innovation Profile and Its Relationship with Pharmaceutical Industry

Background: The pharmaceutical sector undertakes extensive research and development (R&D). Pharmaceutical industries have continued to launch an appreciable number of new medicines, different pharmaceutical formulations, new indications and other innovations that contribute to the growth of this sector. New novel medicines are increasingly essential for continued success given the number of standard medicines now available as low cost generics or biosimilars. Consequently, innovation is a fundamental element in pharmaceutical company competition. Not all innovations though are the same size, type or category with differentiation of innovation essential for commercial success. However, given the wide range of definitions used in the literature, the framing may diffuse. Currently, there are several types and categories of innovation are deficiently harmonized and poorly stratified resulting in analysis trends and provide major obstacles to innovation’s differentiation and in assessing the company's innovative dominant characteristic in the sector. The objective of this study is to stratify and organize, didactically, the field of definitions and concepts of innovation and provide a structural and operational delineation, from a critical point of view, for the classifications of innovation applied to the pharmaceutical industr

An overview of the recent developments on fructooligosaccharide production and applications

Over the past years, many researchers have suggested that deficiencies in the diet can lead to disease states and that some diseases can be avoided through an adequate intake of relevant dietary components. Recently, a great interest in dietary modulation of the human gut has been registered. Prebiotics, such as fructooligosaccharides (FOS), play a key role in the improvement of gut microbiota balance and in individual health. FOS are generally used as components of functional foods, are generally regarded as safe (generally recognized as safe status—from the Food and Drug Administration, USA), and worth about 150€ per kilogram. Due to their nutrition- and health-relevant properties, such as moderate sweetness, low carcinogenicity, low calorimetric value, and low glycemic index, FOS have been increasingly used by the food industry. Conventionally, FOS are produced through a two-stage process that requires an enzyme production and purification step in order to proceed with the chemical reaction itself. Several studies have been conducted on the production of FOS, aiming its optimization toward the development of more efficient production processes and their potential as food ingredients. The improvement of FOS yield and productivity can be achieved by the use of different fermentative methods and different microbial sources of FOS producing enzymes and the optimization of nutritional and culture parameter; therefore, this review focuses on the latest progresses in FOS research such as its production, functional properties, and market data.Agencia de Inovacao (AdI)-Project BIOLIFE reference PRIME 03/347. Ana Dominguez acknowledges Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Portugal, for her PhD grant reference SFRH/BD/23083/2005

Retrieval of volcanic SO<sub>2</sub> from HIRS/2 using optimal estimation

We present an optimal-estimation (OE) retrieval scheme for stratospheric sulfur dioxide from the High-Resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder 2 (HIRS/2) instruments on the NOAA and MetOp platforms, an infrared radiometer that has been operational since 1979. This algorithm is an improvement upon a previous method based on channel brightness temperature differences, which demonstrated the potential for monitoring volcanic SO 2 using HIRS/2. The Prata method is fast but of limited accuracy. This algorithm uses an optimal-estimation retrieval approach yielding increased accuracy for only moderate computational cost. This is principally achieved by fitting the col umn water vapour and accounting for its interference in the retrieval of SO 2 . A cloud and aerosol model is used to evaluate the sensitivity of the scheme to the presence of ash and water/ice cloud. This identifies that cloud or ash above 6km limits the accuracy of the water vapour fit, increasing the error in the SO 2 estimate. Cloud top height is also retrieved. The scheme is applied to a case study event, the 1991 eruption of Cerro Hudson in Chile. The total erupted mass of SO 2 is estimated to be 2300kT±600kT. This confirms it as one of the largest events since the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo, and of comparable scale to the Northern Hemisphere eruption of Kasatochi in 2008. This retrieval method yields a minimum mass per unit area detection limit of 3DU, which is slightly less than that for the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), the only other instrument capable of monitoring SO 2 from 1979 to 1996. We show an initial comparison to TOMS for part of this eruption, with broadly consistent results. Operating in the infrared (IR), HIRS has the advantage of being able to measure both during the day and at night, and there have frequently been multiple HIRS instruments operated simultaneously for better than daily sampling. If applied to all data from the series of past and future HIRS instruments, this method presents the opportunity to produce a comprehensive and consistent volcanic SO 2 time series spanning over 40 years