Thread by @PatientPersists

How much does public research funding affect drug development & market success?

Two papers have looked at this (h/t @mattsclancy @Atelfo ).

Based on these, I ran some quick calculations for ME/CFS and Long Covid

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@mattsclancy @Atelfo Toole (2012) found that 1% increase in NIH funding increases new drugs (17-24y later) by 1.8%. Or about $706M in 2010 USD for 1 drug approval
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@mattsclancy @Atelfo Azoulay et al. (2019) find that $10 million in public funding yields 2.7 new patents (though only 1.4 in the same disease area!)

Only 1 per 116 patents in their database is linked to a successful drug. So, $430 million in cumulative public funding needed for 1 drug approval

@mattsclancy @Atelfo So, where do ME/CFS and Long Covid place on this?

ME/CFS has received, 2008-2024, only a paltry $157M from the NIH.

Adjusted for inflation, that's ~$137M in 2010 dollars.

Only 19-32% of the way to a single approved drug

@mattsclancy @Atelfo Long Covid had received cumulatively about $1.8B from the NIH, that's about $1.4B in 2010 dollars

The models predict 2.02 to 3.31 drugs, based on just this amount. In 17-24 years after funding though..

@mattsclancy @Atelfo The picture looks pretty bleak for ME/CFS. We definitely need more funding for it!

Also, improvements in research quality and improvements in market incentives would significantly improve the # of expected drugs.


And there is a silver lining:

https://x.com/PatientPersists/status/1933946203177168974?t=5H0H2XO9MhW93oHIdbnBVA&s=19

@mattsclancy @Atelfo The research shows significant spillover effects. In fact, more patents (2.2) were filed for *other* indications, than for the original indications for which the NIH grants were (1.4)

LC research is especially likely to spill over to ME/CFS! But it can also be other research!

@mattsclancy @Atelfo Last, please bear in mind that these were hastily created calculations (limited spoons), and I may have misunderstood something. I didn't even read the papers!

I converted the Azoulay patent amount into drugs

Also, in my interpretation here, there are no diminishing returns.

@mattsclancy @Atelfo This was inspired by this blog post by @atelfo
with a long list of interesting questions about biotech,


and the answer to 1 question by @mattsclancy citing the 2 papers I used here atelfo.github.io/2024/04/01/bio…

@mattsclancy @Atelfo Sources:
Toole (2012) - sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Azoulay et al. (2019) - academic.oup.com/restud/article…

@mattsclancy @Atelfo @threadreaderapp unroll please