Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Bioquímica Médica Leopoldo de Meis, Programa de Educação, Gestão e Difusão em Biociências, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil.
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia, Divisão de Comunicação, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil.
Mem Inst Oswaldo Cruz. 2021 Sep 1;116:e200603. doi: 10.1590/0074-02760200603. eCollection 2021.
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Solidarity Program, probably the largest global initiative to encourage and support research in four promising drugs, named Remdesivir, Hydroxychloroquine, β Interferon and the combination Lopinavir / Ritonavir, to reduce the mortality of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Considering the potential impact of Solidarity Program to restrain the current pandemic, the present study aims to investigate whether it was designed upon indicators of scientific productivity, defined as the level of the production of new scientific knowledge and of the institutional capabilities, estimated in terms of scientific publications and technological agreements.
The scientific documents on Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus and Coronavirus were retrieved from Scopus database while the technological agreements on coronavirus were obtained through Cortellis. As for the institutions and countries, we have considered the data on author's affiliations in both set of data. For comparison, we included the analysis of documents related with other drugs or therapies, such as vaccines and antibodies, which were listed in a Clarivate's report on coronaviruses research.
Most of the analysis refers to documents on Coronavirus, the largest group. The number of documents related to WHO's drugs are almost five times higher than in the other groups. This subset of documents involves the largest and most diverse number of institutions and countries. As for agreements, we observed a smaller number of institutions involved in it, suggesting differences between countries in terms of technical and human capabilities to develop basic and/or clinical research on coronavirus and to develop new forms or products to treat or to prevent the disease.
Hence, the results shown in this study illustrate that decisions taken by an international scientific body, as WHO, were mainly based in scientific knowledge and institutional competencies.
2020 年 3 月，世界卫生组织（WHO）启动了团结计划，这可能是全球最大的鼓励和支持四种有前途药物（瑞德西韦、羟氯喹、β干扰素和洛匹那韦/利托那韦联合用药）研究的计划，以降低 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）的死亡率。
考虑到团结计划对遏制当前大流行的潜在影响，本研究旨在探讨该计划是否是基于科学生产力指标设计的，这些指标被定义为新科学知识的产出水平和机构能力，分别以科学出版物和技术协议来衡量。
从 Scopus 数据库中检索了关于α冠状病毒、β冠状病毒、γ冠状病毒和冠状病毒的科学文献，通过 Cortellis 获取了关于冠状病毒的技术协议。对于机构和国家，我们考虑了两组数据中作者所属机构的数据。作为比较，我们还包括了与其他药物或疗法（如疫苗和抗体）相关的文件分析，这些文件被列入科睿唯安关于冠状病毒研究的报告中。
大多数分析涉及冠状病毒相关的文献，这是最大的一组。与世界卫生组织药物相关的文献数量几乎是其他组的五倍。这组文件涉及的机构和国家最多、最广泛。至于协议，我们观察到参与的机构数量较少，这表明各国在开发冠状病毒的基础和/或临床研究以及开发治疗或预防疾病的新形式或产品方面的技术和人力能力存在差异。
因此，本研究的结果表明，国际科学机构（如世卫组织）做出的决策主要基于科学知识和机构能力。
