Apr 02

ITIF Releases White Paper on NIH Funding

March 25, 2019 – The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a white paper today that covered the role NIH funding plays in terms of America’s economic global competitiveness in biomedical research. You can read the entire paper here:

“Healthy Funding: The Critical Role of Investing in NIH to Boost Health and Lower Costs”

Highlights from the paper include:

Despite Increases in the Past Four Years, NIH Funding Still Lags

• NIH funding as a share of GDP in 2019 is still 12 percent below 2003 levels.

China Challenges U.S. Leadership in Biomedical Research

• The Chinese government funds biomedicine start-ups directly. More than 1,000 government-funded venture capital firms seeking to provide as much as $798 billion in capital have been established.

• China is already manufacturing drugs faster and cheaper than we are in the United States.

• China’s $9.2 billion 15-year Precision Medicine Initiative seeks to map 100 million human genomes—far in excess of the Obama administration’s $215 million investment targeting one million patients.

Fund NIH to Reduce Future Health Care Spending

• The development of better drugs and treatments leads to reductions in the cost to society from illness.

• The Milken Institute concluded that the most common chronic diseases cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 trillion each year, and could cost upwards of $6 trillion by 2050.

Fund NIH for High-tech, High-wage Jobs

• Employment in life-sciences sectors has been growing since 2001. Employment in biopharmaceuticals (both production and research) increased by 22 percent between 2001 and 2016.

• Workers in the life-sciences industry earned an average wage of $124,400 in 2016, compared with the median personal income in the United States for full-time wage and salary workers of just under $43,000.