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Optimal selection policies for a sequence of candidate drugs

Part of: Mathematical economics Operations research and management science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2016

C. Charalambous  and
J. C. Gittins
C. Charalambous*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
J. C. Gittins*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
∗ Postal address: Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK.
∗ Postal address: Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK.
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Abstract

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Pharmaceutical companies have to face huge risks and enormous costs of production before they can produce a drug. Efficient allocation of resources is essential to help in maximizing profits. Yu and Gittins (2007) described a model and associated software for determining efficient allocations for a preclinical research project. This is the starting point for this paper. We provide explicit optimal policies for the selection of successive candidate drugs for two restricted versions of the Yu and Gittins (2007) model. To some extent these policies are likely to be applicable to the unrestricted model.

Keywords

Pharmaceutical researchresource allocationsemi-Markov decision processoptimization

MSC classification

Primary: 90B36: Scheduling theory, stochastic
Secondary: 90C40: Markov and semi-Markov decision processes 91B32: Resource and cost allocation

Information

Type
General Applied Probability
Information
Advances in Applied Probability , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 359 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2008 

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