In recent years, funding for research provided by the National Institutes of Health has struggled to keep up with inflation. A recent paper published in Science suggests this could mean bad things for the overall economy. Ana analysis of 27 years of NIH grants shows that 10 percent of them were acknowledged directly in new patents, and the research they funded showed up three times more often.

The authors of this paper analyzed the output of research grants awarded by the NIH, focusing specifically on life-science patents, including patents for drugs, medical devices, and other medical technologies. They did not examine grants in other fields, such as physics.

Between 1980 and 2007, the NIH funded 365,380 grants, nearly half of which were what are called R01-level, which is used to fund large projects. They found that about nine percent of these grants were directly acknowledged by patents, while 31 percent were indirectly linked to new patent applications. The indirect group involved research papers produced using money from the grant; these papers may then be cited in patents.

The authors suspected that some patents have more public health value than others, so they did a secondary investigation into patented and marketed drugs that could be directly or indirectly linked to NIH-funded research. These patents for marketed products are indicative of the highest-impact discoveries. Testing and launching a new drug is an expensive and time consuming process, so if a drug makes it to market, that means both the research team and the FDA are endorsing the drug as positively contributing to public health.

When the authors looked more closely at patents associated with FDA drug approvals, they found that less than one percent of NIH-funded grants were directly acknowledged by a patent for a marketed drug, while five percent were indirectly acknowledged.

The authors were also curious about the differences between grants that funded “basic” or foundational research versus “applied” or translational research. They found analysis to be tricky, as there is no unified definition for these terms in STEM fields. Instead the authors looked at the percentage of grants that were disease-focused (foundational) versus grants that were patient-focused (applied). This split the grants into two equal-sized groups.

Of these grants, the authors saw that approximately 35 percent of disease-oriented grants were acknowledged by patents, whereas only 30 percent of non-disease oriented grants were acknowledged in patents. This analysis shows that patient oriented research and non-patient oriented research both yield patents at roughly the same rate.

Previous research on the value of public funding for research has examined the relationship between grants and patents, but this one looked at individual grant-level data rather than the aggregate data for all STEM fields. Its focus on the indirect influence of grants is also significant. Traditionally, policy-makers focus on the number of patent applications that directly cite NIH grants, which means that the people who make decisions about the availability of scientific funding are missing the large contribution that this research makes towards patents.

Overall, this analysis shows that about a third of all publicly funded grants administered by the NIH generate research that is cited by commercial patent applications. This number is three times larger than the one produced by the traditional metric we've been using. This finding strongly suggests that the overall impact of public funding on the advancement of commercial science is widely underappreciated.

Science, 2017. DOI: 10.1126/science.aal0010 (About DOIs)