Medical Research Got More Money Over Last Decade

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Medical Research Got More Money Over Last Decade

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Published: September 21, 2005

CHICAGO, Sept. 20(AP) - Total spending on medical research in the United States has doubled in the past decade to nearly $95 billion a year, though whether the money is being well spent needs much better scrutiny, a study has found.

"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," said Dr. Hamilton Moses III, co-author of the study in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association and chairman of the Alerion Institute, which conducts studies on research policy.

The authors call on the medical industry, government and foundations to do better at investing in research on diseases with fewer effective treatments, like Alzheimer's, and at translating basic research into new treatments and cures.

The imbalance between late-stage and early-stage research is growing, the authors wrote, and is due partly to lengthy clinical trials required for approving drugs and partly to marketing. Companies often run costly studies to show that their drugs work better than competitors' drugs.

In their funding analysis, Dr. Moses and his colleagues found that the industry sponsors 57 percent of medical research and that the National Institutes of Health pays for 28 percent. That proportion has remained unchanged over the past decade.

The analysis also found that the United States spends about 6 cents of every health care dollar on medical research. But it spends only one-tenth of a cent of every dollar on longer-term evaluation of which drugs and treatments work best at the lowest cost.

"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," said M. Fox, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, a philanthropic group that works on health policy issues. "But we are not spending as much as we could to disseminate the most effective treatments and practices throughout the health system."

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