How Federal Research Support Has Helped Create Life-Changing Medicines
The Trump administration is proposing a nearly 40 percent budget reduction to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which sponsors a significant portion of biomedical research. A new study finds that over 50 percent of small-molecule drug patents this century cite at least one piece of NIH-backed research which would likely be vulnerable to that potential level of funding change.
Gleevec, a cancer drug first approved for sale in 2001, has dramatically changed the lives of people with chronic myeloid leukemia. This form of cancer was once regarded as very difficult to combat, but survival rates of patients who respond to Gleevec now resemble that of the population at large.
Gleevec is also a medicine developed with the help of federally funded research. That support helped scientists better understand how to create drugs targeting the BCR-ABL oncoprotein, the cancer-causing protein behind chronic myeloid leukemia.
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers quantifies how many such examples of drug development exist. The current administration is proposing a nearly 40 percent budget reduction to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which sponsors a significant portion of biomedical research. The study finds that over 50 percent of small-molecule drug patents this century cite at least one piece of NIH-backed research that would likely be vulnerable to that potential level of funding change.
“What we found was quite striking,” says MIT economist Danielle Li, co-author of a newly published paper outlining the study’s results. “More than half of the drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 are connected to NIH research that would likely have been cut under a 40 percent budget reduction.”
Or, as the researchers write in the paper: “We found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced.”
The paper, “What if NIH funding had been 40% smaller?” is published today as a Policy Article in the journal Science. The authors are Pierre Azoulay, the China Program Professor of International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Matthew Clancy, an economist with the group Open Philanthropy; Li, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at MIT Sloan; and Bhaven N. Sampat, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. (Biomedical researchers at both MIT and Johns Hopkins could be affected by adjustments to NIH funding.)
