The evolution of the biotechnology industry in Germany

In the past five years, the climate for commercial biotechnology in Germany has improved significantly and has resulted in an increase in the number of biotechnology companies. On examination of the underlying factors of the evolution of the biotechnology industry in Germany, and against the background of the current situation, it is predicted that many German biotech companies will have to change their business models to focus on product development rather than on platform technologies.     

Syndromes hormonaux — Traitements aigus et syndromes sécrétoires menaçants : VIPomes,Cushing et phéochromocytomes

Severe hormonal hypersecretion are rare medical situations that require urgent management. We will try to summarize the main treatment lines of VIPomes, severe Cushing's and pheochromocytomas. The priority is to manage acute and life-threatening complications related to hypersecretion, then to implement antisecretory treatment. Once the emergency is managed, targeted antitumor treatment can be chosen with a multidisciplinary approach.     

Models and Algorithms for Hub and Spoke Locations for Emergency Service Facilities in Response to Serious Emergency Incidents

This article examines the location-allocation of emergency service facilities as a research subject. The research presents the setup of the single allocation set covering location-allocation models for emergency service facilities under strong time constraints, in view of the shortage of hub & spoke network bypass. The article also presents an extension to the single allocation set covering location-allocation model (SASCP) and the SASCP model with bypass constraints (γ-SASCP) for emergency service facilities under large-scale emergency requirements. For the two models, an improved genetic algorithm was designed and the two models were respectively solved, with the effectiveness of the algorithm verified by a specific example. The impacts of change of parameters such as time discount rate, maximum time constraints, and bypass ratio on the model's results are compared and analyzed, based on solved results by the specific example.     

A Review and Typology of Circular Economy Business Model Patterns

The circular economy (CE) requires companies to rethink their supply chains and business models. Several frameworks found in the academic and practitioner literature propose circular economy business models (CEBMs) to redefine how companies create value while adhering to CE principles. A review of these frameworks shows that some models are frequently discussed, some are framework specific, and some use a different wording to refer to similar CEBMs, pointing to the need to consolidate the current state of the art. We conduct a morphological analysis of 26 current CEBMs from the literature, which includes defining their major business model dimensions and identifying the specific characteristics of these dimensions. Based on this analysis, we identify a broad range of business model design options and propose six major CEBM patterns with the potential to support the closing of resource flows: repair and maintenance; reuse and redistribution; refurbishment and remanufacturing; recycling; cascading and repurposing; and organic feedstock business model patterns. We also discuss different design strategies to support the development of these CEBMs.     

Reductions in Inpatient Mortality following Interventions to Improve Emergency Hospital Care in Freetown,Sierra Leone

Background

The demand for high quality hospital care for children in low resource countries is not being met. This paper describes a number of strategies to improve emergency care at a children''s hospital and evaluates the impact of these on inpatient mortality. In addition, the cost-effectiveness of improving emergency care is estimated.

Methods and Findings

A team of local and international staff developed a plan to improve emergency care for children arriving at The Ola During Children''s Hospital, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Following focus group discussions, five priority areas were identified to improve emergency care; staff training, hospital layout, staff allocation, medical equipment, and medical record keeping. A team of international volunteers worked with local staff for six months to design and implement improvements in these five priority areas. The improvements were evaluated collectively rather than individually. Before the intervention, the inpatient mortality rate was 12.4%. After the intervention this improved to 5.9%. The relative risk of dying was 47% (95% CI 0.369–0.607) lower after the intervention. The estimated number of lives saved in the first two months after the intervention was 103. The total cost of the intervention was USD 29 714, the estimated cost per death averted was USD 148. There are two main limitation of the study. Firstly, the brevity of the study and secondly, the assumed homogeneity of the clinical cases that presented to the hospital before and after the intervention.

Conclusions

This study demonstarted a signficant reductuion in inpatient mortality rate after an intervention to improve emergency hospital care If the findings of this paper could be reproduced in a larger more rigorous study, improving the quality of care in hospitals would be a very cost effective strategy to save children''s lives in low resource settings.     

IN DEFENCE OF PRIORITY REVIEW VOUCHERS

Infectious and parasitic diseases cause enormous health problems in the developing world whereas they leave the developed one relatively unscathed. Research and development (R&D) of drugs for diseases that mainly affect people in developing countries is limited. The problem that relatively few drugs are available for diseases that cause an enormous burden of disease in the developing world is called the 'availability problem'. In recent years, the availability problem has received quite a bit of attention. A number of proposals have been fielded as to how this problem might be minimized. Wild-card patent extensions, advance market commitments, cash prizes and the Health Impact Fund are prominent examples of such proposals. These proposals can be thought of as pull-mechanisms for R&D of drugs for neglected diseases. What has been coined a 'priority review voucher' is another pull-mechanism. This paper is a critical discussion of this pull-mechanism. First, the original priority review voucher scheme, as proposed by Ridley et al. (2006), is described. A number of objections to this scheme are thereafter presented. A few amendments to the original scheme are then suggested, and it is argued that with these amendments in place, the priority review voucher scheme constitutes an attractive way of stimulating R&D of drugs for neglected diseases.     

Development of Australian commercial producers of invertebrate biological control agents from 1971 to 2014

The Australian industry producing invertebrate biological control agents (BCAs) commercially was described for the first time through interviews with company owners, citrus pest management researchers and citrus growers. This industry started with citrus pest management in 1971. Over 40 years it expanded from one company and one commercial BCA to peak at nine companies operating from 2002 to 2010. A period of consolidation resulted in five companies producing 36 commercial BCAs in 2014. Annual gross sales were <AU$10 million compared to >AU$400 million spent on insecticides. Barriers to industry growth included high costs of developing new commercial BCAs partly due to regulatory costs associated with importation of new BCAs into Australia, and low adoption of commercial BCAs due to limited access to information and training. The industry responded to these barriers by collaborating with stakeholders to develop new commercial BCAs, and developing an accreditation scheme to build technical capacity and encourage adoption.     

Sur L'interprétation de la Loi Logistique de Croissance: Une Re-lecture de la Relation Entre Autocatalyse et Croissance On The Interpretation of the Logistic Law of Growth: A New Reading of the Relationships between Autocatalysis and Growth

The logistic function now constitutes the most widely used model for there presentation of growth kinetics of the continuous monotonous type in biological systems (populations, organisms, organs, ...). This ubiquity led to consider logistics from a phenomenological rather than mechanistic viewpoint. Whence the question : can logistics be given an interpretation, a signification which confers the rank of an "explicative" model to it? This Note presents some critical comments on the relationships between logistics and three types of biological systems : population demography, environmental resources, autocatalyzed reactions. The so-called functional (in the mathematical meaning) interpretation, which is then discussed, is based upon a variational principle : the occurrence of a minimum of a function associated with the logistic law. Its present limitation to the only simple logistics of Verhulst and the difficulties of its expression in biological terms are then pointed out. The problem is then examined within the framework of Delattre's transformation system theory which affords a new reading of there lationships between growth and autocatalysis (without requiring reference to a particular reactional chemical analogue). The resulting new model constitutes an extension of Verhulst's logistics which is quite different from the well-known Richards-Nelder function. In addition to its theoretical background, one feature of the new model is the generation of varied growth kinetics, particularly a non-monotonous variation of the specific growth rate r = (1/y)(dy/dt). This property, which is often neglected, is the more valuable as a number of biological growths are characterized by a rate r which is not continuously decreasing. This specific characteristic is not predicted by the usual growth functions.     

The bioseparation needs for tomorrow

Will we replace oil with wheat or corn as a feedstock for producing natural plastic? The success of biotechnology for bulk product manufacturing will heavily depend on engineering solutions in the downstream processes in which separation and purification have a crucial role with respect to commercial development. Development of efficient bioseparation methods is important for a broad range of business areas including pharmaceuticals, nutrition and health products, bio-based materials and crop protection chemicals. Depending on the value of the end product and the scale of production, the processing required varies significantly. Key factors that have an impact on the choice of separation strategy include process throughput, particle size of the product and impurities and the desired end-product concentration. The development of efficient, economical and selective separation methods will be required for successful commercialization of bioprocesses. Despite this well-recognized need, there are relatively few available methods for commercial implementations. Development of novel mechanical systems for selective separation of solid and liquid mixtures must become a top priority for current research investment to reduce the reliance on expensive chromatographic and thermal separation methods.     

The Changing Regulation of Coastal Shipping in Australia

Market access to coastal shipping services is often severely restricted. Most countries impose national flag requirements as a minimum. However, Australia's coastal shipping market has been more open than many other markets, allowing foreign flag access to domestic shipping through a unique permit and licensing scheme. This article assesses Australia's regulation of cabotage by examining the nature of the permits issued to foreign flag companies for domestic shipments and evaluates the changes currently being proposed against a database of permits issued in 2009 and 2010.     

A Risk Elimination Coordination Method for Large Group Decision-Making in Natural Disaster Emergencies

ABSTRACT

In view of the risk characteristics of large group decision-making in emergencies and the difficultly in forming the decision scheme with low risk, the causes of generating risk in urgent group decisions are analyzed. The coordination framework for risk elimination in emergency decisions is constructed. The methods of risk measure and elimination for emergency decisions are proposed to construct the risk elimination coordination mechanism for emergency decisions so that the risk of emergency group decisions is gradually constringed to obtain the emergency decision scheme with risk degree low enough. Finally, an example case is used to validate the realization process and the validity of risk elimination coordination method and mechanism.     

Information-Based Manufacturing with the Web

Manufacturing has been evolving over the years as different needs and technologies arise. This paper describes an emerging manufacturing technology driven by information systems, the global network infrastructure, and new business models driven by the availability of real-time information. Information-based manufacturing concerns using the right information to know what products to make, when to make them, and then making them the best possible. This becomes more complicated when a number of products, facilities, markets, and companies are involved. More than just information is needed. Connectivity, ability to coordinate and integrate, and implementation strategy all are important. Information systems provide the infrastructure to carry out these objectives. Because of the need for an effective information infrastructure, the Internet has the potential to further enhance information-based manufacturing. Information-based manufacturing can be efficient only when the underlying supply-chain network is run efficiently, for the supply chain provides the infrastructure for directing all the activities from receiving raw materials to the delivery of final products. This paper illustrates how the Web technology can help coordinate the supply-chain activities in manufacturing. It also illustrates the relationships between product types, supply-chain structures, information-sharing, coordination, and the Web.     

Corporate Carbon Performance Indicators

The dependency on carbon‐based materials and energy sources and the emission of greenhouse gases have been recognized as major problems of the 21st century. Companies are central to the effort to grapple with these issues due to the large material flows they process and their capabilities for technological innovation. It is important, on the one hand, to determine the individual stake companies have in these issues and, on the other, to measure companies' performance. Since the results of studies thus far have been ambiguous, we define four comprehensive and systematic corporate carbon performance indicators: (1) Carbon intensity is physically oriented and represents a company's carbon use in relation to a business metric. (2) Carbon dependency illustrates the change in physical carbon performance within a given time period. (3) Carbon exposure reveals the financial implications of using and emitting carbon. (4) Carbon risk estimates the change in financial implications of carbon usage within a given time period. On the basis of these general definitions, we specify the indicators for a standardized application that can support two important stakeholders in their decision making: policy makers, who can include such information when evaluating current climate policies and formulating future ones, and investors and financial institutions, which can compare companies with respect to their carbon performance and corresponding financial effects.     

Grey-Theory-Based Optimization Model of Emergency Logistics Considering Time Uncertainty

Natural disasters occur frequently in recent years, causing huge casualties and property losses. Nowadays, people pay more and more attention to the emergency logistics problems. This paper studies the emergency logistics problem with multi-center, multi-commodity, and single-affected-point. Considering that the path near the disaster point may be damaged, the information of the state of the paths is not complete, and the travel time is uncertainty, we establish the nonlinear programming model that objective function is the maximization of time-satisfaction degree. To overcome these drawbacks: the incomplete information and uncertain time, this paper firstly evaluates the multiple roads of transportation network based on grey theory and selects the reliable and optimal path. Then simplify the original model under the scenario that the vehicle only follows the optimal path from the emergency logistics center to the affected point, and use Lingo software to solve it. The numerical experiments are presented to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Intelligent Decision-Making Models for Disaster Management

ABSTRACT

Providing emergency relief to the victims of natural disasters is a hugely complex process fraught with many challenging aspects: multiple uncertainties, little reliable information, scarcity of resources, a variety of involved entities, and so on. Nowadays there is a lot of information that could be used to improve decision-making in disaster management, but usually it is not available at the right moment, in the right way, or it is partially known or vague. In this article we analyze the decision-making process for disaster management from the general view of intelligent decision-making to the specific characteristics of this context. This specificity deals with a new kind of logistics, and it is shown how this humanitarian logistics, specifically designed with the aim of alleviating suffering of vulnerable people, is a growing new research area to develop new decision aid models for disaster management, identifying new and relevant differences with other types of logistics. To illustrate these claims, two models are introduced, one for assessment of consequences in the earlier stage after a disaster (focused on the unknown, one of the main characteristics in disaster management), and another one for last mile distribution of humanitarian aid (focused on the multicriteria nature of decision-making on disaster management).     

Framework for Applying a Complex Adaptive System Approach to Model the Operation of Eco‐Industrial Parks

Models of eco‐industrial parks (EIPs) might help us transform our production systems by fostering the emergence of sustainable EIPs since such models have the potential to support the decision‐making processes of cooperative companies that participate and to decrease operational uncertainties. In this article, a conceptual framework for modeling the operation of EIPs is presented. The framework is underpinned by complex adaptive systems theory, industrial ecology, and an analysis of the experiences of existing EIPs. The proposed framework draws on the observed strengths of two types of industrial symbiosis models—planned eco‐industrial parks (PEIPs) and EIPs that developed through self‐organizing symbiosis (SOS)—as well as their observed weaknesses and the features of complex adaptive systems. From this analysis, five key properties to be modeled are deduced: functionality, reliability, life span, theoretical knowledge, and adaptability. It is proposed that the properties of functionality and theoretical knowledge are determined by the goals of the EIP and its member companies, while the property of adaptability is determined by the understanding that the companies in an EIP have of the environment surrounding the EIP, while the properties of reliability and life span are determined by the internal and external relationships of the companies that make up an EIP.     

Scenario-Based Multi-Objective Optimum Allocation Model for Earthquake Emergency Shelters Using a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm: A Case Study in Chaoyang District,Beijing, China

The correct location of earthquake emergency shelters and their allocation to residents can effectively reduce the number of casualties by providing safe havens and efficient evacuation routes during the chaotic period of the unfolding disaster. However, diverse and strict constraints and the discrete feasible domain of the required models make the problem of shelter location and allocation more difficult. A number of models have been developed to solve this problem, but there are still large differences between the models and the actual situation because the characteristics of the evacuees and the construction costs of the shelters have been excessively simplified. We report here the development of a multi-objective model for the allocation of residents to earthquake shelters by considering these factors using the Chaoyang district, Beijing, China as a case study. The two objectives of this model were to minimize the total weighted evacuation time from residential areas to a specified shelter and to minimize the total area of all the shelters. The two constraints were the shelter capacity and the service radius. Three scenarios were considered to estimate the number of people who would need to be evacuated. The particle swarm optimization algorithm was first modified by applying the von Neumann structure in former loops and global structure in later loops, and then used to solve this problem. The results show that increasing the shelter area can result in a large decrease in the total weighted evacuation time from scheme 1 to scheme 9 in scenario A, from scheme 1 to scheme 9 in scenario B, from scheme 1 to scheme 19 in scenario C. If the funding were not a limitation, then the final schemes of each scenario are the best solutions, otherwise the earlier schemes are more reasonable. The modified model proved to be useful for the optimization of shelter allocation, and the result can be used as a scientific reference for planning shelters in the Chaoyang district, Beijing.