Exploring Linkages Between Business Strategy and Patent Strategy: A Proposed Typology

This paper is an attempt to develop a typology which would theoretically represent the relationship between a patent strategy and a business strategy in a given organization. Such a relationship follows from previous work in related fields which theories a linkage between business strategy and functional strategy that can have a positive impact on organizational performance. An underling assumption is made that intellectual capital represents a functional area for today\u27s high tech firm. In creating the proposed typology, use is made of the Miles and Snow typology of business strategies

Effects of Right-To-Work Laws: Can They Include Higher Levels of Satisfaction For Union Workers?

This paper reviews theories and evidence on the effect of “right-to-work” laws on union members’ satisfaction with their unions. With the increase of right-to-work activity at the state level, and with federal right-to-work legislation pending in Congress, this has returned as an important political issue. Following a brief review of how the hypotheses of “taste,” “free-rider,” and “bargaining power” can influence various effects of right-to-work laws, the idea of utility maximization paired with measures of union satisfaction is explored to show theoretical evidence that greater levels of union satisfaction could exist in right-to-work states than exist in non-right-to-work states. Arguments for both positive and negative effects are compared. The author proposes that, as a future area of research, empirical tests be performed that combine the concept of simultaneous equations with recently developed measures of union satisfaction

ClinGen Variant Curation Interface: a variant classification platform for the application of evidence criteria from ACMG/AMP guidelines.

BACKGROUND: Identification of clinically significant genetic alterations involved in human disease has been dramatically accelerated by developments in next-generation sequencing technologies. However, the infrastructure and accessible comprehensive curation tools necessary for analyzing an individual patient genome and interpreting genetic variants to inform healthcare management have been lacking. RESULTS: Here we present the ClinGen Variant Curation Interface (VCI), a global open-source variant classification platform for supporting the application of evidence criteria and classification of variants based on the ACMG/AMP variant classification guidelines. The VCI is among a suite of tools developed by the NIH-funded Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Consortium and supports an FDA-recognized human variant curation process. Essential to this is the ability to enable collaboration and peer review across ClinGen Expert Panels supporting users in comprehensively identifying, annotating, and sharing relevant evidence while making variant pathogenicity assertions. To facilitate evidence-based improvements in human variant classification, the VCI is publicly available to the genomics community. Navigation workflows support users providing guidance to comprehensively apply the ACMG/AMP evidence criteria and document provenance for asserting variant classifications. CONCLUSIONS: The VCI offers a central platform for clinical variant classification that fills a gap in the learning healthcare system, facilitates widespread adoption of standards for clinical curation, and is available at https://curation.clinicalgenome.org

Comparative genetic architectures of schizophrenia in East Asian and European populations

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder with approximately 1% lifetime risk globally. Large-scale schizophrenia genetic studies have reported primarily on European ancestry samples, potentially missing important biological insights. Here, we report the largest study to date of East Asian participants (22,778 schizophrenia cases and 35,362 controls), identifying 21 genome-wide-significant associations in 19 genetic loci. Common genetic variants that confer risk for schizophrenia have highly similar effects between East Asian and European ancestries (genetic correlation = 0.98 ± 0.03), indicating that the genetic basis of schizophrenia and its biology are broadly shared across populations. A fixed-effect meta-analysis including individuals from East Asian and European ancestries identified 208 significant associations in 176 genetic loci (53 novel). Trans-ancestry fine-mapping reduced the sets of candidate causal variants in 44 loci. Polygenic risk scores had reduced performance when transferred across ancestries, highlighting the importance of including sufficient samples of major ancestral groups to ensure their generalizability across populations

Assembly of a pan-genome from deep sequencing of 910 humans of African descent

We used a deeply sequenced dataset of 910 individuals, all of African descent, to construct a set of DNA sequences that is present in these individuals but missing from the reference human genome. We aligned 1.19 trillion reads from the 910 individuals to the reference genome (GRCh38), collected all reads that failed to align, and assembled these reads into contiguous sequences (contigs). We then compared all contigs to one another to identify a set of unique sequences representing regions of the African pan-genome missing from the reference genome. Our analysis revealed 296,485,284 bp in 125,715 distinct contigs present in the populations of African descent, demonstrating that the African pan-genome contains ~10% more DNA than the current human reference genome. Although the functional significance of nearly all of this sequence is unknown, 387 of the novel contigs fall within 315 distinct protein-coding genes, and the rest appear to be intergenic