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Location of pharmaceutical innovation: 2000–2009

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 9, pages 835–836 (2010)Cite this article

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A key question for the countries in which the leading companies in research-based industries are currently based is the extent to which an analogous shift in the volume and value of innovative science research from these countries to emerging economies occurs; for example, through the stimulation of innovation by government initiatives in these countries. Although outsourcing of process-oriented tasks could allow a greater volume of innovative R&D to be performed for a given level of investment, losing leadership in scientific innovation may result in an inability to capture value from it, and, potentially more importantly, a reduced ability to influence the direction of innovation. For example, one benefit of being a leader in innovation is the ability to focus research activities on health conditions or engineering problems that are of particular interest to the country in question. Indeed, as the level of innovative pharmaceutical R&D in countries such as China has increased, one major focus has been on diseases that are more common in Asia than elsewhere, such as liver cancer1.

This paper focuses on the location of innovation in the pharmaceutical sector, and differs from previous studies by using a more robust methodology to track the global distribution of R&D, which could also be applicable for future assessments to understand trends in the location of innovation.

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Figure 1: Normalized locations of drug patent inventors by region.
Figure 2: Locations of drug patent inventors by country for the top ten countries.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yali Friedman, Ph.D., founder of DrugPatentWatch.com, is at thinkBiotech, 3909 Witmer Rd No. 416, Niagara Falls, New York 14305, USA. info@thinkbiotech.com,

    Yali Friedman

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  1. Yali Friedman
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Friedman, Y. Location of pharmaceutical innovation: 2000–2009. Nat Rev Drug Discov 9, 835–836 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3298

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