Social Network Analysis of Pharmaceutical Innovation

I was just notified of a fascinating paper citing my research from DrugPatentWatch.com.

Briefly, I found two surprising results: Firstly, pharmaceutical innovation has been essentially immobile — it remains almost completely rooted in the United States and Western Europe. Secondly, there is virtually no innovation coming out of so-called emerging economies such as India and China (i.e. <1% as many patent inventors as the US).

Going further, Hu et al published a social network analysis of pharmaceutical innovation. They found that the network of international collaboration developed from a star-like US-centric network in the late 1990s to a more distributed network with a diminished centrality of the US in the late 2000s. Importantly the decrease is US centrality is due to increase collaboration between European neighbors, rather than due to a rise among emerging economies.

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