ABSTRACT
RNA therapeutics have taken a center stage during the pandemic, due to the successful development and launch of two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech). Although there are already multiple commercially successful RNA drugs for the treatment of orphan indications, this is the first time that RNA therapies unlock their commercial value in mass population. With the backdrop of massive capital and interest flooding into the field of RNA therapeutics, many companies began to expand their orphan-indication-centered RNA therapeutic portfolio into common diseases. In this article, we calculated the success rate of publicly available RNA therapeutic pipelines at each development stage as well as their likelihood of approval (LOA). We found those targeting common diseases have a much lower LOA rate when compared with pipelines targeting rare diseases (5.8% vs. 23.8%). Consequently, we discussed the underlying challenges and potential opportunities for RNA therapeutics moving from rare to common diseases.Copyright © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
RNA therapeutics have taken a center stage during the pandemic, due to the successful development and launch of two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech). Although there are already multiple commercially successful RNA drugs for the treatment of orphan indications, this is the first time that RNA therapies unlock their commercial value in mass population. With the backdrop of massive capital and interest flooding into the field of RNA therapeutics, many companies began to expand their orphan-indication-centered RNA therapeutic portfolio into common diseases. In this article, we calculated the success rate of publicly available RNA therapeutic pipelines at each development stage as well as their likelihood of approval (LOA). We found those targeting common diseases have a much lower LOA rate when compared with pipelines targeting rare diseases (5.8% vs. 23.8%). Consequently, we discussed the underlying challenges and potential opportunities for RNA therapeutics moving from rare to common diseases. Copyright © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates a robot that distributed hand-sanitizer over an eight month period (October 2020-June 2021) in public places on the Oregon State University campus. During COVID times, many robots have been deployed in public places as social distancing enforcers, food delivery robots, UV-sanitation robots and more, but few studies have assessed the social situations of these robots. Using the context of robot distributing hand sanitizer, this work explores the benefits that social robots may provide to encouraging healthy human activities, as well as ways in which street-performance inspired approaches and a bit of humor might improve the quality and experience of functional human-robot interactions. After gaining human-in-the-loop deployment experience with a customized interface to enable both planned and improvized responses to human bystanders, we run two sub-studies. In the first, we compare the performance of the robot (moving or still) relative to a traditional hand sanitizer dispenser stick (N=2048, 3 week data collection period). In the second, we evaluate how varied utterance strategies further impact the interaction results (N=185, 2 week data collection period). The robot dramatically outperforms the stick dispenser across all tracked behavioral variables, cuing high levels of positive social engagement. This work finds the utterance design is more complex socially, and offer insights to future robot designers about how to integrate helpful and playful speech into service robot interactions. Finally, across both sub-studies, the work shows that people in groups are more likely to engage with the robot and each other, as well as sanitize their hands. © 2022 IEEE.