In Canada – our closest trading partner – pharmaceutical patents for approximately 20 medicines have been successfully challenged over the last decade for lacking "utility" or "usefulness". Prior to these rulings, each medicine in question had been widely used by Canadians, having been approved as safe and effective by Health Canada, the country's regulatory agency.
However, caution must be used when attempting to extrapolate logistic models to other dose regimens, as these models are largely empirical, with little or no mechanistic basis, and lack usefulness when applied to conditions (e.g., schedules, or routes of administration) different from those from which they were originally derived.
The most commonly investigated barriers were lack of use (14/25), lack of awareness (12/25), lack of access (11/25), lack of familiarity (7/25), lack of usefulness (7/25), lack of motivation (4/25) and external barriers (5/25).
The competitive advantage of generator-based agents lies in their convenient synthetic schemes; however, this attribute is greatly diminished if the tracers lack clinical usefulness.
Our results are consistent with previous studies which showed that IL-6 lacks clinical usefulness in the discrimination and reclassification between favorable and poor outcome groups of stroke patients [ 4, 5].
In addition, metadata in GenBank are often lacking, thereby limiting the usefulness of this repository for molecular epidemiologic studies.
Brief summaries of systematic reviews overcame the knowledge barriers of lack of access, lack of awareness and familiarity; attitudinal barriers of perceived lack of usefulness and relevance; and the external barrier of systematic reviews usually having a standard format for all readers, regardless of their level of training.
Lack of confidence, decreased motivation, a perceived lack of usefulness of systematic reviews and limited trust in them, were grouped under the Attitudes section.
These include lack of access, lack of awareness, lack of familiarity, lack of perceived usefulness, limited actual use in practice and finally, a number of external barriers to do with systematic review content, presentation and wider organisational factors.
While software developers and the wealthiest of early adopters are now rushing to buy it in the US, I think it lacks the sheer usefulness that would make it a must-have device for the mass market.
