After a decade of doubling, the Rate of increase in biomedical research Funding slowed from 2003 to 2007, and after adjusted for inflation, the absolute level of funding from the National Institutes of Health and industry appears to have decreased by 2 percent, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Total funding increased from $75.5 billion in 2003 to $101.1 billion in 2007 and, after adjustment for inflation, this indicated an increase of 14 percent from 2003 to 2007. A previous study found that funding increased at a compound Annual Growth Rate of 7.8 percent for between 1994 and 2003, compared with a compound annual rate of 3.4 percent for 2003 to 2007.
Compared with the previous study, biomedical research spending by industry fell from a Compound Annual Growth rate (adjusted for inflation) of 8.1 percent from 1994 to 2003 compared with 5.8 percent for 2003 to 2007. From 2003 to 2008, the number of new and novel drug and device approvals didn’t rise, although the authors concede this is an incomplete measure of research productivity.
Support from pharma, biotechs and device makers rose from $40 billion in 2003 to $58.6 billion in 2007, an increase of 25 percent when adjusted for inflation. The largest contributor to biomedical research remained drugmakers. Conversely, device makers demonstrated the largest rate of growth (59 percent), followed by biotechs (41 percent) and drugmakers (15 percent), adjusted for inflation.
“This analysis suggests that market value of different industry sectors move in parallel with research investment, which has driven the strikingly favorable performance of the medical device sector from 1994 to 2003 and the biotechnology (chiefly large-molecule drugs) sector since 2003. Performance of conventional pharmaceuticals (predominantly small-molecule drugs) has decreased in comparison,” the authors conclude.
