Mr. Biswas is a 23-year-old orphan with a wife, a 3-year-old daughter and no formal education.
And at Stratford-upon-Avon, The Orphan of Zhao - "the Chinese Hamlet" - becomes the first Chinese play ever produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The increase in demand as the economy kicks back into gear is a tailwind for utilities as long as interest rates, which compete for widow-and-orphan money with the high-yielding utilities, stay low.
Tahari, an Israeli orphan with a rough-and-tumble youth, had found success early, but he got stuck in the quicksand of New York nightlife.
In recent months, a growing number of so-called orphan drugs, which are used to treat so-called rare diseases that afflict small patient populations, have won FDA approval.
Orphan books - of which there are thought to be five million - are titles where the authors cannot be found.
But an alliance of 100 rare-disease support groups from 12 European countries has coalesced around orphan-drug legislation to form Eurordis.
More than one-third were under the age of 18, like Mohammed Alam, a ten-year-old orphan, who left Bihar with his aunt and uncle a month ago.
Last summer, he adopted a three-year-old orphan from Russia.
Biomarin (nasdaq: BMRN - news - people ) and Alexion (nasdaq: ALXN - news - people ) have launched drugs for orphan diseases.
Pfizer ( PFE - news - people ) were to gain approval of such an orphan drug, for example, the company might be granted more time to market its blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor before any manufacturer was permitted to produce a generic version of that drug.
Without orphan-drug privileges at home, the richer European firms head to America to get them.
In the marketing of Xyrem, Orphan Medical pushed off-label uses for which there was no scientific support.
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Orphan-drug status, for example, can help a biotech firm raise capital on the strength of its latest product.
Orphan or under-utilized servers do little useful work and suck up power.
According to Rein Strijker, the company's director of orphan-drug development, the promise of an exclusive market in America justified the costly and complex business of making the product (which is harvested from the milk of genetically engineered rabbits).
One such medicine is Xyrem, a narcolepsy drug sold by tiny Orphan Medical (nasdaq: ORPH - news - people ).
The compound annual growth rate of the orphan drug market between 2001 and 2010 was 25.8 percent, compared with 20.1 percent for a matched control group of non-orphan drugs.
That would allow Arena to target the hundreds of so-called orphan GPCRs that have no known ligands.
One reason to purse the unusual use is it is a so-called orphan disease afflicting only about 65, 000 Americans.
In fact, the Cowen analysts say, the last stock to outperform after its FDA launch was Alexion, the maker of the high-priced orphan drug Soliris, in 2007.
An earlier version of the drug, Ceredase, helped launch the lucrative market for high-priced orphan disease drugs, which is now one of the brightest spots in biotech.
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The Orphan Drug Act, enacted in 1982, provides incentives--including tax credits and exemption from user fees--for the development of drugs for rare diseases.
Should the settlement be cleared, it will permit Google non-exclusive rights to orphan works (those without an established writer) and will give it a 30 per cent cut of books sold via Google Books, both things that authors have agreed to.
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They trace the evil-plagued adventures of three orphan children while reading like a warped version of Harry Potter.
Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the seven-inch bandwagon with an orphan product.
New orphan drugs are just one of the reasons that individuals with hard-to-treat diseases have reason to hope.
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Analysts have interpreted that as giving Genzyme's treatment, Fabryzyme, the inside track toward getting a six-year term of exclusivity under orphan drug laws, which is meant to encourage companies to develop treatments for rare diseases.
Thirty years ago, the Orphan Drug Act provided financial incentives to pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments for rare diseases -- diseases that afflict fewer than 200, 000 people.
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