惠氏公司是全球500强企业之一，也是全球最大的以研发为基础的制药和保健品公司之一。惠氏在研究、开发、制造和销售药品、疫苗、生物制品、营养品和非处方药品等方面处于全球领先地位。惠氏的产品改善了全球各地人们的生活质量。惠氏的主要业务部门有惠氏药物部、惠氏健康药物部和Fort Dodge动物保健品部等。 美国惠氏公司是世界最大的以研究为基础制药和健康护理产品公司之一，总部位于美国新泽西州的麦迪逊市 （Madison），现有员工52,000名，业务遍及全球100多个国家和地区。2006年全球销售204亿美元，2006年净收入42亿美元（不包括非经常项目）。 2006年每股稀释收益3.1美元（不包括非经常项目）。 中国上市的主要产品：钙尔奇D、善存、善存银、怡诺思、倍美力、倍美安、倍美盈、特治星等。 惠氏在制药、疫苗和生物技术方面的领导地位具有悠久的历史。惠氏在妇女卫生保健、神经系统疾病、肌肉与骨骼疾病、心血管疾病的治疗、疫苗、抗感染、血友病、免疫制剂和抗肿瘤等领域都有业界领先的产品。惠氏同样也是营养品领域和健康药物领域的领先者。 它在处方药和非处方药的研究、开发及制造和经营方面占有举足轻重的地位，同时，它在疫苗、生物工程、农产品以及动物健康产品方面也占有重要地位。
Erythromycin, avermectin and rapamycin are clinically useful polyketide natural products produced on modular polyketide synthase multienzymes by an assembly-line process in which each module of enzymes in turn specifies attachment of a particular chemical unit. Although polyketide synthase encoding genes have been successfully engineered to produce novel analogues, the process can be relatively slow, inefficient, and frequently low-yielding. We now describe a method for rapidly recombining polyketide synthase gene clusters to replace, add or remove modules that, with high frequency, generates diverse and highly productive assembly lines. The method is exemplified in the rapamycin biosynthetic gene cluster where, in a single experiment, multiple strains were isolated producing new members of a rapamycin-related family of polyketides. The process mimics, but significantly accelerates, a plausible mechanism of natural evolution for modular polyketide synthases. Detailed sequence analysis of the recombinant genes provides unique insight into the design principles for constructing useful synthetic assembly-line multienzymes.
The overall impact of first and second generation antipsychotics on quality of life and symptoms of people with schizophrenia remains controversial. We applied health state modeling to data from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) Schizophrenia study, a randomized trial of antipsychotic medications, and evaluated the likelihood of patients moving to more favorable health states over time. We applied K-means clustering to the data to create discrete groupings of patients with symptom and side effect characteristics that were then validated using quality of life measures. We compared cluster distributions across medications at baseline and 6 months after randomization. 1,049 patients were included in the initial cluster analysis. Five health states were identified: (1) low symptoms and low side effects (LS + LSE) (2) low symptoms and obesity (LS + Ob) (3) high symptoms and low side effects (HS + LSE) (4) high symptoms with depression and akathisia (HS + Dp + Ak) and (5) moderate symptoms and high side effects (MS + HSE). Six-month outcomes among patients randomly assigned to perphenazine, olanzapine, risperidone and quetiapine were compared. At baseline, almost 20% of patients were in the worst health state (HS + Dp + Ak), with greater decreases at 6 months in this health state for perphenazine (9.2% decrease) and olanzapine (11.1%) groups compared to risperidone (4.7%) and quetiapine (6.7%). This study demonstrated that health state analysis can provide insight into the overall clinical state of patients beyond the mere comparison of average scores and largely confirmed original CATIE findings.
