THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT NURTURES THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
By Frank A McDonough | Published on September 14, 2019
When you present your doctor’s prescription at the drug counter, your action is typically the last step in a long journey that began with drug discovery research often funded by the federal government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Md.
NIH is a key component in the pharmaceutical industry collaborating with companies and university contributors. NIH's roots extend back to the Marine Hospital Service in the late 1790s providing medical relief to sick and disabled men in the U.S. Navy. Today NIH has 27 institutes and centers including the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Mental Health. Collectively, they conduct and coordinate research across the different disciplines of biomedical research.
Promising research results are picked up by pharmaceutical companies for the arduous and costly steps involved in testing and bringing a drug to market
Medical research is another sector in which the American public and industry rely upon the federal government. A recent study by Bentley University, “Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals, 2010-2016,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the full scope and scale of NIH’s public funding in the drug discovery stage.
Between 2010 and 2016, NIH poured more than $100 billion into research that contributed, either directly or indirectly to 210 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Eighty four of the 210 approvals were first-in-class drugs, drugs that use a new and unique mechanism of action for treating a medical condition according. Note that the Food and Drug Administration approved only 113 first-in-class drugs from 1999 to 2013.
Historically, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest government player in basic drug discovery research. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also contributes to the discovery stage by taking on some relatively high-risk biologic projects. State governments in California and Texas and private foundations are players, although much smller, in the drug discovery process.
As the world’s leading medical research institution, the NIH funds more than 35,000 research grants each year to scientists across the country making advances against heart disease, cancer, and many other diseases. NIH-funded scientists have won 93 Nobel Prizes over the years, and researchers in the NIH’s own labs have won five Nobel Prizes.
According to the Bentley study, NIH-funded research has contributed to dramatic decreases in heart disease and stroke mortality rates, increased cancer survival rates, new medications for mental illness, vaccines to protect against infectious diseases, and many other advances in medicine.
Bentley’s researchers reviewed two million published researched reports before publishing its findings. Their study is the first to measure the scale of NIH funding and its contributions in basic biomedical research. The Bentley team concluded that reduced research funding for NIH would slow the pipeline for treating morbid disease.
Sources:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/2329
NIH Photo: The NIH Logo
Second Photo: From the NIH history files