A unique, holistic approach covering all functions and phases of pharmaceutical research and development While there are a number of texts dedicated to individual aspects of pharmaceutical research and development, this unique contributed work takes a holistic and integrative approach to the use of computers in all phases of drug discovery, development, and marketing. It explains how applications are used at various stages, including bioinformatics, data mining, predicting human response to drugs, and high-throughput screening. By providing a comprehensive view, the book offers readers a unique framework and systems perspective from which they can devise strategies to thoroughly exploit the use of computers in their organizations during all phases of the discovery and development process. Chapters are organized into the following sections: * Computers in pharmaceutical research and development: a general overview * Understanding diseases: mining complex systems for knowledge * Scientific information handling and enhancing productivity * Computers in drug discovery * Computers in preclinical development * Computers in development decision making, economics, and market analysis * Computers in clinical development * Future applications and future development Each chapter is written by one or more leading experts in the field and carefully edited to ensure a consistent structure and approach throughout the book. Figures are used extensively to illustrate complex concepts and multifaceted processes. References are provided in each chapter to enable readers to continue investigating a particular topic in depth. Finally, tables of software resources are provided in many of the chapters. This is essential reading for IT professionals and scientists in the pharmaceutical industry as well as researchers involved in informatics and ADMET, drug discovery, and technology development. The book's cross-functional, all-phases approach provides a unique opportunity for a holistic analysis and assessment of computer applications in pharmaceutics.

Transforming India into a digital state has been an objective of successive governments in India. However, the digital, by its very nature, is a capricious, multi-dimensional entity. Its operationalization across multiple sectors in India has highlighted the fact that the digital compact with publics in India is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, devices such as mobile phones have enabled access and efficiencies, and on the other, they have increased the scope for surveillance capitalism and the expansion of governmentality. The digital is at the same time a resource, commodity, and process that is absolutely fundamental to most if not all productive forces across multiple sectors. As a part of the Media Dynamics in South Asia series, this volume explores the making of digital India and specifically deals with the contradictions of an imperfect democracy, internal compulsions, and external pressures that continue to play crucial roles in the shaping of the same. Mindful of the key roles played by political economy and context and based on conversations with theory and practice, it makes a case for critical understanding of the digital embrace in India.

The European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE) series presents the latest innovations and achievements of leading professionals from the industrial and academic communities. The ESCAPE series serves as a forum for engineers, scientists, researchers, managers and students to present and discuss progress being made in the area of computer aided process engineering (CAPE). European industries large and small are bringing innovations into our lives, whether in the form of new technologies to address environmental problems, new products to make our homes more comfortable and energy efficient or new therapies to improve the health and well being of European citizens. Moreover, the European Industry needs to undertake research and technological initiatives in response to humanity's "Grand Challenges," described in the declaration of Lund, namely, Global Warming, Tightening Supplies of Energy, Water and Food, Ageing Societies, Public Health, Pandemics and Security. Thus, the Technical Theme of ESCAPE 21 will be "Process Systems Approaches for Addressing Grand Challenges in Energy, Environment, Health, Bioprocessing & Nanotechnologies."

This book explores the question of whether software should be patented. It analyses the ways in which the courts of the US, the EU, and Australia have attempted to deal with the problems surrounding the patentability of software and describes why it is that the software patent issue should be dealt with as a patentable subject matter issue, rather than as an issue of novelty or nonobviousness. Anton Hughes demonstrates that the current approach has failed and that a fresh approach to the software patent problem is needed. The book goes on to argue against the patentability of software based on its close relationship to mathematics. Drawing on historical and philosophical accounts of mathematics in pursuit of a better understanding of its nature and focusing the debate on the conditions necessary for mathematical advancement, the author puts forward an analytical framework centred around the concept of the useful arts. This analysis both explains mathematics’, and therefore software’s, nonpatentability and offers a theory of patentable subject matter consistent with Australian, American, and European patent law.

This book describes a global assessment of stem cell engineering research, achieved through site visits by a panel of experts to leading institutes, followed by dedicated workshops. The assessment made clear that engineers and the engineering approach with its quantitative, system-based thinking can contribute much to the progress of stem cell research and development. The increased need for complex computational models and new, innovative technologies, such as high-throughput screening techniques, organ-on-a-chip models and in vitro tumor models require an increasing involvement of engineers and physical scientists. Additionally, this book will show that although the US is still in a leadership position in stem cell engineering, Asian countries such as Japan, China and Korea, as well as European countries like the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are rapidly expanding their investments in the field. Strategic partnerships between countries could lead to major advances of the field and scalable expansion and differentiation of stem cells. This study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

This volume discusses advances in applied nonlinear optimal control, comprising both theoretical analysis of the developed control methods and case studies about their use in robotics, mechatronics, electric power generation, power electronics, micro-electronics, biological systems, biomedical systems, financial systems and industrial production processes. The advantages of the nonlinear optimal control approaches which are developed here are that, by applying approximate linearization of the controlled systems’ state-space description, one can avoid the elaborated state variables transformations (diffeomorphisms) which are required by global linearization-based control methods. The book also applies the control input directly to the power unit of the controlled systems and not on an equivalent linearized description, thus avoiding the inverse transformations met in global linearization-based control methods and the potential appearance of singularity problems. The method adopted here also retains the known advantages of optimal control, that is, the best trade-off between accurate tracking of reference setpoints and moderate variations of the control inputs. The book’s findings on nonlinear optimal control are a substantial contribution to the areas of nonlinear control and complex dynamical systems, and will find use in several research and engineering disciplines and in practical applications.