News by Subject Business & Economics

C-Path and NORD launched the Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform (RDCA-DAP) in Rockville, MD on Tuesday, Sept. 17. The platform, funded by a cooperative agreement through the Food and Drug Administration, [Critical Path Public-Private Partnerships Grant Number U18 FD005320], will provide data and analytics to aid in the understanding of rare diseases and to inform long-term drug development and support innovative trial designs.

Conventional wisdom in the startup community is that with the right incentives, the venture can meet and exceed expectations, and a major component of this is how you structure your contracts for founders and early employees. New research has found that when it comes to those contracts, it may be less about incentive, and more about identifying the right people to incentivize.

Deaths of prominent life scientists tend to be followed by a surge in highly cited research by newcomers.

By combining cutting-edge machine learning with 19th-century mathematics, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) mathematician is working to make NASA spacecraft lighter and more damage tolerant by developing methods to detect imperfections in carbon nanomaterials used to make composite rocket fuel tanks and other spacecraft structures.

Tooth decay, gum disease and oral cancers are a major health burden worldwide, but are largely ignored by the global health community, according to a series on oral health in The Lancet that publishes July 20, 2019. In a commentary accompanying the series, Cristin Kearns and Lisa Bero express growing concern that the dental profession will not make meaningful progress in combating the oral health epidemic until it addresses the sugar industry's influence on dental research.

New research featured in Nature Biotechnology studies the impact of the funding by the National Institutes of Health in the field of cancer research. Using patents as proxies, it finds evidence for a productivity slowdown around 1995. The study suggests that the results are in line with an incremental, rather than a high-risk high-rewards funding strategy by the federal agencies.

A quantitative analysis going back over a period of more than 90 years shows that almost a third of patents in the US rely on federal research funding.