Each of the more than 200 drugs approved in the US between 2010 and 2016 was supported by scientific research funded by the National Institutes of Health, Stat News reports.
Fred Ledley and his colleagues at Bentley University unearthed more than 2 million publications housed in PubMed related to the 210 new molecular entities approved by the Food and Drug Administration or to the known targets of those drugs. Using the NIH RePORTER database, they then found that 29 percent of those papers were linked to NIH-funded projects. They report that NIH funding contributed to every one of the new drugs approved between 2010 and 2016 and that these studies totaled some $100 billion. The findings are out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"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," Ledley tells Stat News. He and his colleagues add in their paper that any reduction in basic research funding could slow the development of new drugs.