A recent report in Science states that rotaviruses (the cause of many a diarrhoea) lead to 20–60 deaths a year in the United States and about 600,000 in the developing world. This is one of the many disturbing health statistics that differentiates the developed from the developing world. If we...

In any assessment of the R&D capabilities of Indian companies, their patent holdings would have to be examined. Here we identify the number of patents assigned by four foreign governments to Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies up to December 31, 2009. It is known that the United...

This analysis looks at the identity of different Indian assignees of 2300 US patents upto 30 June 2009. These patents are classified according to the nature of the assignee, that is companies, government departments and national research laboratories, universities, other non-profit organizations...

Patents are important for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. In order to remain valid, an issued patent has to be ‘maintained’ by the payment of fees to the patent office at three well-defined times over several years. The article examines whether Indian companies in these sectors...

Once a humble, beloved, charity-based arm of the healthcare industry, hospice is now a multi-billion dollar industry, funded almost exclusively by Medicare, run by for-profit corporations answering to private equity investors and Wall Street, and more and more frequently plagued by fraud and...

The quest for better livelihood opportunities has led to large-scale migration and the mushrooming of slums in several Indian cities. Unfortunately, a significant section of the urban poor do not have access to many of the benefits of urban development. It emerges from the re-analysis of Madhya...

In drug R&D, there are big challenges today. Big pharma is struggling with a drying up of the pipeline and neglected diseases do not attract much drug development effort. India faces a different challenge not often discussed: it has not yet brought out a single widely used new drug. This is...

In order to help reduce drug prices, governments in countries such as India are devising policies to help local biotech companies. These companies are also initiating original drug discovery programmes. How much should these governments and companies be concerned about patents? We have...

Given that medical devices in India tend to be imported (75%), it is important to understand local attempts at innovation in this space. Based largely on interviews, we have prepared case studies of six local innovative device companies. The innovators' efforts have been enabled by close...

This paper documents recent structural changes in China's corporate landscape, based on company level data, providing a complementary perspective to that of official Chinese statistics. We classify China's largest companies by revenue since 2004 (based on Fortune Global 500 rankings), and...