Social, cultural and economic aspects of antimicrobial resistance.

Although often considered only a medical problem, antimicrobial resistance is an evolutionary challenge accelerated by social, cultural and economic factors that lead to the misuse, overuse and abuse of life-saving antimicrobial medicines. The antimicrobial resistance challenge is compounded by inadequate attention to disease prevention and response, global circulation of people and products, differences in industry and market regulations across countries, and a fragile pipeline of new antibiotics and their alternatives. While the discovery of new antimicrobials will provide temporary solutions, sustainable success requires rigorous social science research that explores the drivers of antimicrobial resistance. These solutions should promote balance between equitable access to, conservation of, and innovation for antimicrobials, adapted to local conditions across the globe

Antibiotic research and development: business as usual?

This article contends that poor economic incentives are an important reason for the lack of new drugs and explains how the DRIVE-AB intends to change the landscape by harnessing the expertise, motivation and diversity of its partner

Changing perspectives on the internationalization of R&D and innovation by multinational enterprises: a review of the literature

Internationalization of R&D and innovation by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) has undergone a gradual and comprehensive change in perspective over the past 50 years. From sporadic works in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, it became a systematically analysed topic in the 1970s, starting with pioneering reports and “foundation texts”. Our review unfolds the theoretical and empirical evolution of the literature from dyadic interpretations of centralization versus decentralization of R&D by MNEs to more comprehensive frameworks, wherein established MNEs from Advanced Economies still play a pivotal role, but new players and places also emerge in the global generation and diffusion of knowledge. Hence views of R&D internationalization increasingly rely on concepts, ideas and methods from IB and other related disciplines such as industrial organization, international economics and economic geography. Two main findings are highlighted. First, scholarly research pays an increasing attention to the network-like characteristics of international R&D activities. Second, different streams of literature have emphasized the role of location- specific factors in R&D internationalization. The increasing emphasis on these aspects has created new research opportunities in some key areas, including inter alia: cross-border knowledge sourcing strategies, changes in the geography of R&D and innovation, and the international fragmentation of production and R&D activities

Simulating market entry rewards for antibiotics development

We design an agent based Monte Carlo model of antibiotics research and development (R&D) to explore the effects of the policy intervention known as Market Entry Reward (MER) on the likelihood that an antibiotic entering pre-clinical development reaches the market. By means of sensitivity analysis we explore the interaction between the MER and four key parameters: projected net revenues, R&D costs, venture capitalists discount rates, and large pharmaceutical organizations' financial thresholds. We show that improving revenues may be more efficient than reducing costs, and thus confirm that this pull-based policy intervention effectively stimulates antibiotics R&D

Flexible Time Triggered Ethernet: A Cost Efficient COTS-Based Technology for the Development of Launcher Networks

The future development of launch vehicles provides for an increase of operational flexibility, obtained by introducing avionics based on advanced sensing devices distributed throughout the launcher. Needs for high bandwidth communications make currently used MIL-STD-1553B not sufficient anymore, since it only offers a limited bandwidth (1 Mbps) bus solution. This work proposes a new launcher network based on Commercial-off-The-Shelf (COTS) Ethernet technology, with a bandwidth increase to at least 100 Mbps and support of safety critical for the transport of Guide, Navigation and Control (GNC) messages. The temporal requirements of the GNC messages are guaranteed by formulating an optimization problem whose objective is the minimization of the used bandwidth. The results show how the proposed solution allows for a low bandwidth consumption and the respect of the GNC messages temporal requirements

Performance comparisons of flexible time triggered ethernet and TTEthernet technologies for space launcher networks

The new generation launchers require lower implementation costs inter-communication networks along with deterministic latency, and greater flexibility, to interconnect the terminals performing the Guide, Navigation and Control operations and producing/receiving telemetry traffic. Currently employed MIL-STD-1553B is no longer enough due to the demands for high bandwidth communications because it only provides a restricted bandwidth (1 Mbps) bus solution. Ethernet is an attractive high bandwidth alternative but needs additional functionality to meet avionics requirements. The well-established TTEthernet solution, which can provide determinism for individual message flows, is high cost, consequence of the use of a proprietary technology. The objective of the paper is to assess the effectiveness of a new low-cost Ethernet network design to use in launchers, through a comparison of the performance with TTEthernet. The following are the paper's main contributions: i) the definition of the Flexible Time Triggered Ethernet (FTTE), a low-cost Ethernet architecture capable of supporting services with deterministic latency needs; ii) Through the modeling of the optimization message scheduling for both solutions, a performance evaluation comparison of the proposed solution with TTEthernet is made (in a real network scenario characterized by the messages of VEGA, a small launcher defined by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency). Performance approaches the one of TTEthernet when cut through switching technology is used