Medical Research Spending Doubled Over Last 10 Years to $95B Annually, Study Says

Total expenditures for U.S. medical research have doubled in the past 10 years to almost $95 billion annually, although "whether the money is being well spent needs much better scrutiny," according to a study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the AP/Las Vegas Sun reports. The study -- led by Hamilton Moses, chair of the Alerion Institute -- found that the health care industry sponsors 57% of U.S. medical research and that NIH sponsors 28%. The percentages have remained about the same over the past 10 years, the study found. In addition, the study found that the U.S. spends almost six cents of every health care dollar on medical research but spends only one-tenth of a cent of every dollar for long-term studies on the cost-effectiveness of different medications and treatments. According to the study, foundations, governments and the health care industry should spend more on research related to diseases with few effective treatments, such as Alzheimer's disease, and improve the conversion of basic research into new treatments and cures. The study also said that the gap between late stage and early stage research has increased, in part because of the lengthy clinical trials required for approval of new medications and in part because of marketing (Johnson, AP/Las Vegas Sun, 9/20). According to the JAMA report, the industry has shifted to favor late-state trials (Moses et al., JAMA, 9/21). The study was part of a special issue of JAMA focusing on the state of U.S. medical research, depicting an "amorphous, mostly profit-driven system, where industry research focuses on existing drugs and lets discovery-stage research lag behind," the AP/Sun reports.

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"If we're soon going to be spending $100 billion a year, we'd better have treatments that work over a long period of time against diseases that are important today and will be more important tomorrow. If we don't know those conditions are satisfied, we can't judge whether we're getting our money's worth," Moses said. Dan Fox, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, said, "The data in this article make it plain that we are spending huge amounts of money, more than any other country, to develop new drugs and devices and other treatments." He added, "But we are not spending as much as we could to disseminate the most effective treatments and practices throughout the health system." Ken Johnson, senior vice president at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that the pharmaceutical industry has conducted important research related to a number of diseases, adding, "So many diseases that were once virtual death sentences, including AIDS and cancer, are now often chronic diseases" (AP/Las Vegas Sun, 9/20).

The study is available online.