Upcoming Reports - Cancer
Causing more than 10 million deaths worldwide in 2007, cancer is the most devastating human disease. It is also, by far, the single area of research receiving the greatest amount of R&D funds worldwide. Although historically, cancer research has been mainly supported by governments and charitable organizations, corporate spending is growing extremely rapidly, with an important share of R&D occurring in industries. With more than 700,000 papers published in the last 10 years and nearly 60,000 active patents worldwide, cancer is undoubtedly one of the most prolific and competitive research fields.
But where does this R&D take place? Which countries and organizations have the largest and most valuable intellectual property portfolios? What are the countries', universities' and companies' strengths considering their different approaches to preventing, diagnosing and curing cancer?
This bibliometric report provides a detailed examination of the scientific activity in cancer research based on scientific papers, and examines the intellectual property related to cancer using statistics on patents. The central aim of this analysis is to draw a clear picture of the trends in cancer research and to identify leaders in the most relevant research areas. For this purpose, emphasis is placed on ranking research and innovation at the country, company and university levels. The report focuses on the seven broad areas of scientific interest defined in the Common Scientific Outline developed by the International Cancer Research Portfolio:
- Biology
- Etiology (causes of cancer)
- Prevention
- Early Detection, Diagnosis, and Prognosis
- Treatment
- Cancer Control, Survivorship, and Outcomes Research
- Scientific Model Systems
The report also presents statistics on individual types of cancer. A unique aspect of this report is that information on areas of scientific interest is crossed with information on cancer types to efficiently identify research groups working on specific and innovative approaches to studying and curing cancer.
Cancer is a relatively well-established area of research and experts in the domain may have the impression that the main areas of scientific activity and the most important players in this domain are already known. The 2008 Cancer R&D report reveals surprising players in very specific niches as well as important incoming players in cancer research as a whole. For instance, emerging countries are rapidly closing the gap with the traditional leaders and developing promising new avenues of cancer research.