Suchergebnisse

Escalating energy demand may be the most important issue facing the United States and the world today. There is little disagreement that research and development (R&D) is needed to develop new energy technologies for the future; however, there is less agreement over the specific research agenda to be pursued and how that agenda is funded. This book addresses the social importance of new energy technologies, illustrates policy-relevant applications of evaluation techniques and proposes new perspectives for a US energy investment strategy. -- Through detailed examples related to solar, geothermal, and vehicle technologies, the authors outline the need for robust evaluation methods to document social returns to taxpayers' R&D investments. They argue that such evaluations are necessary for the public sector to make rational decisions about the allocation of its scares resources. The evaluation methods considered involve developing alternative technology and market pathways from which the benefits of government research can be measured.

Abstract
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is the fourth largest institute in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Surprisingly, there is a conspicuous void of policy studies related to the research activities of NHLBI in comparison to NIH or the National Cancer Institute. This paper investigates the likelihood that a business funded through NHLBI's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program will commercialize from its Phase IIB translational support. Commercialization is one performance metric that quantifies a policy dimension of the success of the funded SBIR project. Based on an empirical analysis of sixty-one Phase IIB projects, we find that the most significant covariate with the likelihood of commercialization is the growth in human capital within the business since the Phase IIB award.

The development of disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD) faces a number of barriers. Among these are the lack of surrogate biomarkers, the exceptional size and duration of clinical trials, difficulties in identifying appropriate populations for clinical trials, and the limitations of monotherapies in addressing such a complex multifactorial disease. This study sets out to first estimate the consequent impact on the expected cost of developing disease-modifying treatments for AD and then to estimate the potential benefits of bringing together industry, academic, and government stakeholders to co-invest in, for example, developing better biomarkers and cognitive assessment tools, building out advanced registries and clinical trial-readiness cohorts, and establishing clinical trial platforms to investigate combinations of candidate drugs and biomarkers from the portfolios of multiple companies. Estimates based on interviews with experts on AD research and development suggest that the cost of one new drug is now $5.7 billion (95% confidence interval (CI) $3.7–9.5 billion) and could be reduced to $2.0 billion (95% CI $1.5–2.9 billion). The associated acceleration in the arrival of disease-modifying treatments could reduce the number of case years of dementia by 7.0 million (95% CI 4.4–9.4 million) in the United States from 2025 through 2040.