US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade

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• This pattern of funding is consistent with the linear model of innovation that underlies federal science policy.

• there is a flow of fundamental knowledge from publicly funded, basic science, sometimes referred to as “scientific capital,” to private industry, which provides the economic capital investments and technical capabilities required for drug development, manufacture, and marketing.

• o promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development; ….. ; to ensure that inventions made by nonprofit organizations and small business firms are used in a manner to promote free competition and enterprise

• to promote the commercialization and public availability of inventions made in the United States by United States industry and labor;

• to ensure that the Government obtains sufficient rights in federally supported inventions to meet the needs of the Government and protect the public against nonuse or unreasonable use of Inventions

• we identified NIH funding for research associated with every one of these drugs or their biological targets.

• In this context, NIH funding is associated with a robust pipeline of new drugs.

• the NIH is remarkably efficient at funding research that is utilized in the discovery or development of new drugs, commercialized, and publicly available.

• large pharmaceutical companies had median net income margins of 13.8%, significantly greater than those of other large corporations in the S&P 500 (7.7%) and similar to those of other research-driven companies.

• NIH investments in basic biomedical science are creating value in the form of new medicines for treating disease and economic activity.

• While we identified 22 thousand issued patents resulting from research that was directly or indirectly related to drugs approved from 2010-2019, only 567 of these patents were listed in Orange Book as contributing to the marketing exclusivity of approved products, and only 27 of the 311 study drugs included in this database[1] were protected by these patents.

• Patents that are only indirectly related to new drugs represent “intangible assets” rather than “tangible assets,” and, thus, do not contribute to the calculated value of the corporation or its shareholders.

• In our study, we found that every one of the new drugs approved from 2010-2019 was developed and distributed by companies, which are estimated to invest as much as $1.5 billion on average in each new product launched.