Endocrine Insider
May 26, 2010

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The May 31, 2010 cover article of Newsweek discusses the slow progress towards new cures and treatments from research funded by the National Institutes of Health.  “Desperately Seeking Cures” states that the Food and Drug Administration approved 157 drugs from 1996 to 1999, but only 74 from 2006 to 2009, and the return on taxpayers’ investment in medical research “has been approximately as satisfying as the AIG bailout.”  The comparison to the AIG bailout was the focus of letters to the editor of Newsweek by United for Medical Research (UMR) and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).  The Society is a member of both organizations and is a founding member of UMR.  Formed last year, UMR has taken a fresh approach to advocacy for increased federal funding for biomedical research.  The coalition includes 20 of the nation’s most prominent research institutions, patient groups, health and science advocacy organizations, biotech companies and other industry leaders.  Excerpts from the letters are included below.

Comparing the return on investment of NIH funding to the AIG bailout is an outright fallacy, and measuring the impact of funding only in terms of cures is a deficient analysis. Investment in NIH research has improved countless lives and led to life-saving drugs, like Gleevec for chronic myeloid leukemia, t-PA to reduce disability from stroke and other therapies emerging from the human genome project. The “valley of death” was aggravated by the economic crisis, which sucked private funding out of a research ecosystem that flourishes around NIH funding. To address this, NIH Director Francis Collins has made translational research a top 2011 budget priority.
-John Seffrin, United for Medical Research

By comparing the return on investment in medical research to the AIG bailout, Sharon Begley and Mary Carmichael misrepresent and denigrate a long, impressive list of research-based advances in human health.  Deaths from cancer have plummeted as a result of Gleevic, Tamoxifen, or Rituximab, and millions of Americans are alive today because of drugs to prevent heart attacks and stroke.  For those afflicted with these and other diseases, there is much more that remains to be done.  But without research we will never get there.
-Mark Lively, President, FASEB

The Newsweek authors believe that the barriers to exploiting the fundamental discoveries include scientists’ unwillingness to engage in the “grunt work” that turns breakthroughs into drugs or test toxicity and efficacy in lab animals other than mice.  The patent system and NIH technology licensing office, as well as the high cost of continued testing, can also serve as impediments to pushing these discoveries through the “valley of death.”  The article discusses some private partnerships that are making gains in taking the discoveries made inside NIH labs to the next level of development but claims that academia, NIH, and disease foundations will have to change how they operate to push these discoveries through the process.