Pub­lic funds help late-stage de­vel­op­ment of about 25% of new drugs, study finds

One in four new drugs ap­proved in the US be­tween Jan­u­ary 2008 and De­cem­ber 2017 re­ceived di­rect fund­ing from pub­lic re­sources for late stage re­search or through spin-off com­pa­nies cre­at­ed from pub­lic re­search in­sti­tu­tions, a study pub­lished in the BMJ on Wednes­day found.

As the drug pric­ing de­bate has ac­cel­er­at­ed in re­cent months, the de­bate over whether pub­lic or pri­vate en­ti­ties do the ma­jor­i­ty of drug de­vel­op­ment work has con­tin­ued, with the gen­er­al as­sump­tion that the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health (NIH) funds much of the ear­ly-stage re­search (the Con­gres­sion­al Re­search Ser­vice ex­plained in April how NIH aids ba­sic re­search that trans­lates in­to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal de­vel­op­ment) while bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies most of­ten fund the lat­er clin­i­cal stages that lead to the ap­proval and mar­ket­ing of new drugs.

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