Originally published September 27 2005
Increased spending on medical research may be wasted
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In the past decade, the amount of money spent on medical research in the United States has doubled to nearly $95 billion a year, however a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association questions whether the increased spending has led to any real benefits and urges medical industry, government and foundations to practice more efficient spending, research diseases with few effective treatments and do better at translating expensive research into tangible treatments.
Total U.S. spending on medical research 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.
The report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association comes amid heightened public attention to medical research because of liability lawsuits over the painkiller Vioxx, political debate over stem-cell research and the untapped potential of curing or preventing disease through mapping the human genome.
"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 and chairman of the Alerion Institute, which conducts studies on research policy.
What emerges from the issue is a picture of an amorphous, mostly profit-driven system, where industry research focuses on existing drugs and lets discovery-stage research lag behind.
The authors call on the medical industry, government and foundations to do better at investing in research on diseases with fewer effective treatments, such as Alzheimer's, and at translating basic research into new treatments and cures.
The authors have ties to the industry, medical schools and health companies, doing consulting work and sitting on drug company boards, according to financial disclosures published with the study.
In their funding analysis, Moses and his colleagues found that the industry sponsors 57 percent of medical research, and the National Institutes of Health pays for 28 percent.
In separate JAMA articles, National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni said genetics advancements and stem-cell discoveries require teams of experts who haven't worked together before, such as biologists and computer programmers, to convert basic science into new therapies.
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