Pharmaceutical patenting trends on drugs and lifestyle diseases: an analysis of Indian and global status

The Indian pharmaceutical sector is large and has the potential of a global leader for low-priced high-quality drugs. The new patent regulations had a strong impact on the drug industry in India. There is a serious decline in the number of pharma patents recently after compulsory licensing for drugs was implemented in India. While regulations are meant for reducing the prices of essential drugs, there are investment-related issues when a patent is subjected to voluntary licensing. The present study focuses on three phases in pharmaceutical patenting identified by analysing the major patent databases and the potential shift in pharma patenting sector from acute to lifestyle disease-based drugs. The recent trend identified in the pharma patenting sector in India is quite unusual and unreported so far

Patent Database: Their Importance in Prior Art Documentation and Patent Search

In knowledge based economies the nation’s economic status depends on the production, distribution and use of knowledge and information. The recent trend in the economic growth of nations is mainly determined by innovative technological knowhow of the individuals. Intellectual property has gained attention in this era of knowledge. The vast amount of data generated through the application of intellectual assets is managed with the help of various in- silico tools. In recent days, the patent databases have gained importance due to the detailed information available on the granted patent and other details, such as, legal status of the patent applications, which are not available through any other literature search. This review paper attempts to describe different types of patent databases available, their unique features, strengths, weakness and their major purpose. This paper details the information on how to access a patent database, the relevance of patent information obtained from these databases in prior art search, patent analysis, and the drawbacks present in these patent databases

Prevalence and Determinants of Domestic Accidents in a Rural Area of Kanchipuram District, Tamil Nadu

Accident is defined as, ‘‘an unintentional injury which is undesirable, incidental and unplanned event that could have been prevented under circumstances leading to the accident being recognized’’. Accidents are of different types and domestic accidents are a worldwide threat but have seen resurgence in rural India. The main purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and determinants of domestic accidents in rural area of Tamil Nadu and educate the people to reduce its burden. Materials and method: A community based cross sectional study, using a pre designed and pretested questionnaire was done in a rural area of Kanchipuram district, Tamil Nadu from 4th January 2017 to 31st January 2017. Data was collected from 1560 adults of both sexes and those who were the permanent residents of the study area. History of accident/injury during the past 3 months was obtained to avoid the recall bias. Results: It was found that 11.8 %( n=184) of the total study participants had a history of some form of accident/injury during the past 3 months. Out of these 184 subjects, 56.5 %(n=104) had domestic accidents. It was found that 51 %( n=53) of the domestic accidents have occurred due to ‘Fall’. Maximum numbers of the domestic accidents (42.3%) have occurred while the study subjects were working. Conclusion: Domestic accidents similar to any other disease have their own natural history and a sound knowledge about various determinants is essential to plan and administer prevention and control measures, and thereby reduce their burden especially in rural population. Increased awareness about the determinants will reduce the burden of the domestic accidents as they don’t simply befall on us from fate or bad luck. Keywords: Domestic, Accidents, Injury, Fal

Simple FOPI tuning method for real - order time delay systems

Fractional-order controllers (FOC) can be more adequate to control systems with complex dynamics than integer-order controllers; however, how to obtain FOC is still being explored vigorously. This paper deals with a tuning approach for FOC with primary requirements of simplicity in technique and robustness. A simple analytical method to tune fractional-order proportional-integral (FOPI) controller for known system transfer functions is proposed. Study shows the simplicity and efficiency of the presented design method over some previously published approaches

Improved Lossy Image Compression with Priming and Spatially Adaptive Bit Rates for Recurrent Networks

We propose a method for lossy image compression based on recurrent, convolutional neural networks that outperforms BPG (4:2:0 ), WebP, JPEG2000, and JPEG as measured by MS-SSIM. We introduce three improvements over previous research that lead to this state-of-the-art result. First, we show that training with a pixel-wise loss weighted by SSIM increases reconstruction quality according to several metrics. Second, we modify the recurrent architecture to improve spatial diffusion, which allows the network to more effectively capture and propagate image information through the network's hidden state. Finally, in addition to lossless entropy coding, we use a spatially adaptive bit allocation algorithm to more efficiently use the limited number of bits to encode visually complex image regions. We evaluate our method on the Kodak and Tecnick image sets and compare against standard codecs as well recently published methods based on deep neural networks