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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 14 2018, @07:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the funding++ dept.

An analysis of research papers has found that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided funding to the research of 210 new drugs that were approved from 2010 and 2016:

A new study makes a strong case for the importance of government support for basic research: Federally funded studies contributed to the science that underlies every one of the 210 new drugs approved between 2010 and 2016.

Researchers at Bentley University scoured millions of research papers for mentions of those 210 new molecular entities, or NMEs, as well as studies on their molecular targets. Then, they looked to see which of those studies had received any funding from the National Institutes of Health.

The authors say the study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to capture the full scope of public funding behind FDA-approved drugs, both directly and indirectly. They also say it points to the need for continued federal funding for basic science — which the Trump administration has previously suggested slashing.

"Knowing the scale of the investment in the basic science leading to new medicines is critical to ensuring that there is adequate funding for a robust pipeline of new cures in the future," said Dr. Fred Ledley, one of the study's authors and a Bentley University researcher who studies the intersection of science and industry.

Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016 (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715368115) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by unauthorized on Wednesday February 14 2018, @09:48PM (7 children)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Wednesday February 14 2018, @09:48PM (#637897)

    So why wouldn't they cough up, if they have to pay for their own research?

    Because they won't do their own research. If you increase the minimal wage, the companies will be forced to pay their workers more or face prosecution. If you stop giving them free research, they are under no obligation to pay for research. There is a finite amount of capital and the capitalist model encourages investment into short-term goals with profit margins that can be identified ahead of time. What libertarians propose is that this will incentivize people to seek the greater profit margins of innovation, but what happens in reality is the exact opposite.

    Take for example the gaming industry. Large corporations keep rehashing the same old shit over and over again, and it takes innovative indie developers to develop new ideas. However the gaming industry is special in that the cost of entry is very low, you simply cannot have indie drug research or indie space tech.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @10:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @10:55PM (#637931)

    You absolutely can have indie drug research, there are just major bureaucratic and legal hurdles to manufacturing and distributing.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday February 14 2018, @11:34PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday February 14 2018, @11:34PM (#637951) Journal

    You were doing well, till you let us know about your area of expertise, the gaming industry.

    FFS, this has nothing at all in common with gaming. There is no government agency providing gate keeping services to the gaming industry!!

    Sometimes it wise to end your post one paragraph early.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:52AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:52AM (#637978) Journal

    Because they won't do their own research. If you increase the minimal wage, the companies will be forced to pay their workers more or face prosecution. If you stop giving them free research, they are under no obligation to pay for research.

    Sorry, you're not getting it. Companies are just as "forced" to employ people as they are forced to do research. They always have the choices of automation, employment in the developing world, or just not doing the work at all. Meanwhile, abandoning research altogether will eventually either force the company to invest in someone else's research or disappear.

    There is a finite amount of capital and the capitalist model encourages investment into short-term goals with profit margins that can be identified ahead of time.

    And what other model is any different? Short term thinkers circularly act the same no matter the economic model. What changes is that they get rewarded in some systems. That's happening in the present government nanny research models. Government does the research hence greatly reduced need for businesses to pay for their own research.

    Take for example the gaming industry. Large corporations keep rehashing the same old shit over and over again, and it takes innovative indie developers to develop new ideas. However the gaming industry is special in that the cost of entry is very low, you simply cannot have indie drug research or indie space tech.

    And government funding is one of the big reasons for that. It's hard to enter a market when the established players have government funding to lower the risk of their high cost research and the indie does not.

    • (Score: 2) by unauthorized on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:12AM (1 child)

      by unauthorized (3776) on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:12AM (#637987)

      Sorry, you're not getting it. Companies are just as "forced" to employ people as they are forced to do research.

      Companies are forced to employ people because someone as to do the grunt work, and the CEO ain't doing it.

      And what other model is any different? Short term thinkers circularly act the same no matter the economic model. What changes is that they get rewarded in some systems. That's happening in the present government nanny research models. Government does the research hence greatly reduced need for businesses to pay for their own research.

      And I propose that your economic paradigm encourages and rewards short-term thinkers while penalizing long-term thinkers. State-funded research is a hack around an economic policy that is inherently technologically stagnant.

      And government funding is one of the big reasons for that. It's hard to enter a market when the established players have government funding to lower the risk of their high cost research and the indie does not.

      The barrier of entry is all the expensive and hard to manufacture specialist equipment. A microbiology lab costs more than your typical biology nerd can casually spend.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:47AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:47AM (#638007) Journal

        Companies are forced to employ people because someone as to do the grunt work, and the CEO ain't doing it.

        And as I already pointed out, that can be done with a machine, in a developing world country, or not at all.

        And I propose that your economic paradigm encourages and rewards short-term thinkers while penalizing long-term thinkers. State-funded research is a hack around an economic policy that is inherently technologically stagnant.

        The government nanny is not my economic paradigm. We also know that low government interference in US science from the period between the US Civil War and the start of the Second World War (the "Gilded Age") resulted in the transformation of the US from backwater colony to budding superpower with a world class scientific system. There was plenty of private-side investment in science, including pure science, during that period. So history doesn't fit your narrative.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:56AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:56AM (#638115)

      Government does the research hence greatly reduced need for businesses to pay for their own research.

      No. Government funded research is not focused on revenue projections in the next 10 quarters. It's called basic research. What companies fund is applied science. You need the first to get the 2nd. Without someone funding basic research, you are stuck with no building blocks for your applied science funded by companies.

      Who the fuck would fund CERN if not governments? Who would fund ITER? Or things like Hubble??? There is no application for any of these for decades. Decisions makers today will be long dead before any applied science can be derived from this stuff.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:52PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:52PM (#638286) Journal

        Government funded research is not focused on revenue projections in the next 10 quarters.

        It's the next election cycle instead.