CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 248Health and Medical Research ImpactsPharmaceutical Economics and PolicyResearch, Science, and Academia

Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016

Open access
Galkina Cleary, Ekaterina, Beierlein, Jennifer M., Khanuja, Navleen Surjit, McNamee, Laura M., Ledley, Fred D.·2018·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.1715368115PMC PMC5878010
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Significance: This report shows that NIH funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. Collectively, this research involved >200,000 years of grant funding totaling more than $100 billion. The analysis shows that >90% of this funding represents basic research related to the biological targets for drug action rather than the drugs themselves. The role of NIH funding thus complements industry research and development, which focuses predominantly on applied research. This work underscores the breath and significance of public investment in the development of new therapeutics and the risk that reduced research funding would slow the pipeline for treating morbid disease.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.1715368115

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Decisions about allocation of taxpayer dollars influence which scientific ideas receive support, which fields advance, and which investigators are able to initiate and sustain research programs.

    “Through competitive grant programs at agencies such as the NSF and the NIH, decisions about the allocation of taxpayer dollars influence which scientific ideas receive support, which fields advance, and which investigators are able to initiate and sustain research programs (3–10).”

    From The rise of large language models and the direction and impact of US federal research funding (2026) · cites this paper as [4]

    The Discussion (page unavailable) says NIH funding supports investigator-initiated basic research and that cuts could slow research and delay new drugs. This supports the general importance of public funding, but the paper does not establish how allocation decisions determine which investigators can sustain programs or which fields advance; it also says NSF funding was outside its analysis. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • The federal funding process plays a central role in shaping the direction, diversity, and long-run impact of the US scientific enterprise and the global research landscape.

    “Thus, the federal funding process plays a central role in shaping the direction, diversity, and long-run impact of the US scientific enterprise and—given America’s scientific leadership—the global research landscape as well (3–10).”

    From The rise of large language models and the direction and impact of US federal research funding (2026) · cites this paper as [4]

    The Discussion reports that NIH-funded basic research contributed to all FDA-approved new drugs studied from 2010–2016 and warns that funding cuts could delay future drugs. That supports a central, long-run role for federal funding in biomedical innovation, but the paper does not establish effects on the diversity of US science or on the global research landscape. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 36

  1. [2]Collins FS 2011 Reengineering translational science: The time is right Sci Transl Med 3 90cm17 PMC5101940 21734173
  2. [4]Cockburn I Henderson R 1996 Public-private interaction in pharmaceutical research Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 93 12725 12730 8917485 PMC34128
  3. [5]Zycher B DiMasi JA Milne C-P 2010 Private sector contributions to pharmaceutical science: Thirty-five summary case histories Am J Ther 17 101 120 20027102
  4. [6]Chakravarthy R Cotter K DiMasi J Milne C-P Wendel N 2016 Public-and private-sector contributions to the research and development of the most transformational drugs in the past 25 years: From theory to therapy Ther Innov Regul Sci 50 759 768 30231735
  5. [7]Reichert JM Milne C-P 2002 Public and private sector contributions to the discovery and development of “impact” drugs Am J Ther 9 543 555 12424516
  6. [8]Varmus H 2006 The new era in cancer research Science 312 1162 1165 16728627
  7. [9]Woodcock J Brumfield M Gill D Zerhouni E 2014 The driving role of consortia on the critical path to innovative therapies Nat Rev Drug Discov 13 781 782 25551158
  8. [11]DiMasi JA Hansen RW Grabowski HG 2003 The price of innovation: New estimates of drug development costs J Health Econ 22 151 185 12606142
  9. [12]Munos B 2009 Lessons from 60 years of pharmaceutical innovation Nat Rev Drug Discov 8 959 968 19949401
  10. [13]Scannell JW Blanckley A Boldon H Warrington B 2012 Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency Nat Rev Drug Discov 11 191 200 22378269
  11. [16]Stevens AJ 2011 The role of public-sector research in the discovery of drugs and vaccines N Engl J Med 364 535 541 21306239
  12. [18]Kaitin KI Bryant NR Lasagna L 1993 The role of the research-based pharmaceutical industry in medical progress in the United States J Clin Pharmacol 33 412 417 8331197
  13. [19]Sampat BN 2009 Academic patents and access to medicines in developing countries Am J Public Health 99 9 17 19008514 PMC2636619
  14. [20]Sampat BN Lichtenberg FR 2011 What are the respective roles of the public and private sectors in pharmaceutical innovation? Health Aff (Millwood) 30 332 339 21289355
  15. [21]Kneller R 2010 The importance of new companies for drug discovery: Origins of a decade of new drugs Nat Rev Drug Discov 9 867 882 21031002
  16. [22]Patridge EV Gareiss PC Kinch MS Hoyer DW 2015 An analysis of original research contributions toward FDA-approved drugs Drug Discov Today 20 1182 1187 26113307
  17. [24]McNamee LM Walsh MJ Ledley FD 2017 Timelines of translational science: From technology initiation to FDA approval PLoS One 12 e0177371 28481922 PMC5421779
  18. [25]McNamee LM Ledley FD 2012 Patterns of technological innovation in biotech Nat Biotechnol 30 937 943 23051809
  19. [27]Beierlein JM McNamee LM Walsh MJ Ledley FD 2015 Patterns of innovation in Alzheimer’s disease drug development: A strategic assessment based on technological maturity Clin Ther 37 1643 51.e3 26243074
  20. [28]McNamee LM Ledley FD 2017 Modeling timelines for translational science in cancer; the impact of technological maturation PLoS One 12 e0174538 28346525 PMC5367812
  21. [29]Swinney DC 2013 Phenotypic vs. target-based drug discovery for first-in-class medicines Clin Pharmacol Ther 93 299 301 23511784
  22. [31]Drews J 2000 Drug discovery: A historical perspective Science 287 1960 1964 10720314
  23. [32]Gibbs JB 2000 Mechanism-based target identification and drug discovery in cancer research Science 287 1969 1973 10720316
  24. [33]Gabor Miklos GL 2005 The human cancer genome project–One more misstep in the war on cancer Nat Biotechnol 23 535 537 15877064
  25. [34]Kotz J 2012 Phenotypic screening, take two Sci Bus Exch 10.1038/scibx.2012.380 · DOI
  26. [41]Xu Q Boggio A Ballabeni A 2014 Countries’ biomedical publications and attraction scores. A PubMed-based assessment F1000 Res 3 292 PMC4566288 26401263
  27. [42]Boyack KW Jordan P 2011 Metrics associated with NIH funding: A high-level view J Am Med Inform Assoc 18 423 431 21527408 PMC3128410
  28. [44]Collins FS 2012 NIH basics Science 337 503 22859455 PMC5102022
  29. [50]Roach M Cohen WM 2013 Lens or prism? Patent citations as a measure of knowledge flows from public research Manage Sci 59 504 525 24470690 PMC3901515
  30. [51]Bishop JM Kirschner M Varmus H 1993 Science and the new administration Science 259 444 445 8424162
  31. [52]Kornberg A 1997 The NIH did it! Science 278 1863 9417629
  32. [58]Reardon S Tollefson J Witze A Ross E 2017 Trump budget would slash science programmes across government Nature 546 19 20 28569829
  33. [59]Matthews KR Evans KM Lane NF 2017 Science advice in the trump white house Science 355 574 576 28183933
  34. [60]Ioannidis JP 2014 Increasing value and reducing waste in research design, conduct, and analysis Lancet 383 166 175 24411645 PMC4697939
  35. [61]Chalmers I 2014 How to increase value and reduce waste when research priorities are set Lancet 383 156 165 24411644
  36. [62]Ioannidis JP 2014 How to make more published research true PLoS Med 11 e1001747 25334033 PMC4204808

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Galkina Cleary, E., Beierlein, J. M., Khanuja, N. S., McNamee, L. M., & Ledley, F. D.
Affiliations
  • Center for Integration of Science and Industry, Bentley University, Waltham, MA 02452;
  • Bentley University (US)
Corresponding author
Ledley, Fred D.
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Published
2018-02-12
Volume
115
Issue
10
Pages
2329-2334
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1715368115
PMC
PMC5878010
OpenAlex
W2791975964
Cited by
248
References
4
Citations by year
2026: 19 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 46 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 1
FWCI
28.60
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, public-domain)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
National Biomedical Research Foundation (NA)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Health and Medical Research Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Research, Science, and Academia
Keywords
NIH funding, new chemical entities, drug approval, drug target identification, targeted screening, phenotypic screening, first-in-class drugs, journalists, federal research funding, drug development
MeSH terms
Humans, National Institutes of Health (U.S.), United States, Drug Approval, Drug Discovery, Translational Research, Biomedical

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review