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As more and more money has been spent on biomedical research in the US over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, according to a report published in PNAS.
Investigators found that the number of scientists in the US has increased about 9-fold since 1965, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget has increased about 4-fold.
But the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased about 2-fold, and life expectancy gains have remained constant, at roughly 2 months per year.
“The idea of public support for biomedical research is to make lives better, but there is increasing friction in the system,” said study author Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We are spending more money now just to get the same results we always have, and this is going to keep happening if we don’t fix things.”
“There is something wrong in the process, but there are no simple answers,” said study author Anthony Bowen, an MD/PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.
“It may be a confluence of factors that are causing us not to be getting more bang for our buck.”
Bowen and Dr Casadevall said one such factor may be that increased regulations have added to the non-scientific burdens on scientists who could otherwise spend more time at the bench.
Another potential explanation is that the “easy” cures for various conditions have been found, but to tackle cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases, for example, is inherently more complex.
Dr Casadevall and Bowen also cited “perverse” incentives for researchers to cut corners or oversimplify their studies to gain acceptance into top-tier medical journals. The pair said this has led to an “epidemic” of retractions and findings that cannot be reproduced and are therefore worthless.
“The medical literature isn’t as good as it used to be,” Dr Casadevall said. “The culture of science appears to be changing. Less important work is being hyped, when the quality of work may not be clear until decades later when someone builds on your success to find a cure.”
In one recent study, researchers estimated that more than $28 billion, from both public and private sources, is spent each year in the US on preclinical research that can’t be reproduced, and the prevalence of these studies in the literature is 50%.
“We have more journals and more papers than ever,” Bowen said. “But the number of biomedical publications has dramatically outpaced the production of new drugs, which are key to improving people’s lives, especially in areas for which we have no good treatments.”
Dr Casadevall said he doesn’t doubt that more cures for diseases are out there to be found, and a more efficient system of biomedical research could help push along scientific discovery.
“Scientists, regulators, and citizens need to take a hard look at the scientific enterprise and see which [problems] can be resolved,” he said. “We need a system with rigor, reproducibility, and integrity, and we need to find a way to get there as soon as we can.” 
Photo by Rhoda Baer
As more and more money has been spent on biomedical research in the US over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, according to a report published in PNAS.
Investigators found that the number of scientists in the US has increased about 9-fold since 1965, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget has increased about 4-fold.
But the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased about 2-fold, and life expectancy gains have remained constant, at roughly 2 months per year.
“The idea of public support for biomedical research is to make lives better, but there is increasing friction in the system,” said study author Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We are spending more money now just to get the same results we always have, and this is going to keep happening if we don’t fix things.”
“There is something wrong in the process, but there are no simple answers,” said study author Anthony Bowen, an MD/PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.
“It may be a confluence of factors that are causing us not to be getting more bang for our buck.”
Bowen and Dr Casadevall said one such factor may be that increased regulations have added to the non-scientific burdens on scientists who could otherwise spend more time at the bench.
Another potential explanation is that the “easy” cures for various conditions have been found, but to tackle cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases, for example, is inherently more complex.
Dr Casadevall and Bowen also cited “perverse” incentives for researchers to cut corners or oversimplify their studies to gain acceptance into top-tier medical journals. The pair said this has led to an “epidemic” of retractions and findings that cannot be reproduced and are therefore worthless.
“The medical literature isn’t as good as it used to be,” Dr Casadevall said. “The culture of science appears to be changing. Less important work is being hyped, when the quality of work may not be clear until decades later when someone builds on your success to find a cure.”
In one recent study, researchers estimated that more than $28 billion, from both public and private sources, is spent each year in the US on preclinical research that can’t be reproduced, and the prevalence of these studies in the literature is 50%.
“We have more journals and more papers than ever,” Bowen said. “But the number of biomedical publications has dramatically outpaced the production of new drugs, which are key to improving people’s lives, especially in areas for which we have no good treatments.”
Dr Casadevall said he doesn’t doubt that more cures for diseases are out there to be found, and a more efficient system of biomedical research could help push along scientific discovery.
“Scientists, regulators, and citizens need to take a hard look at the scientific enterprise and see which [problems] can be resolved,” he said. “We need a system with rigor, reproducibility, and integrity, and we need to find a way to get there as soon as we can.”
Photo by Rhoda Baer
As more and more money has been spent on biomedical research in the US over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, according to a report published in PNAS.
Investigators found that the number of scientists in the US has increased about 9-fold since 1965, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget has increased about 4-fold.
But the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased about 2-fold, and life expectancy gains have remained constant, at roughly 2 months per year.
“The idea of public support for biomedical research is to make lives better, but there is increasing friction in the system,” said study author Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We are spending more money now just to get the same results we always have, and this is going to keep happening if we don’t fix things.”
“There is something wrong in the process, but there are no simple answers,” said study author Anthony Bowen, an MD/PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.
“It may be a confluence of factors that are causing us not to be getting more bang for our buck.”
Bowen and Dr Casadevall said one such factor may be that increased regulations have added to the non-scientific burdens on scientists who could otherwise spend more time at the bench.
Another potential explanation is that the “easy” cures for various conditions have been found, but to tackle cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases, for example, is inherently more complex.
Dr Casadevall and Bowen also cited “perverse” incentives for researchers to cut corners or oversimplify their studies to gain acceptance into top-tier medical journals. The pair said this has led to an “epidemic” of retractions and findings that cannot be reproduced and are therefore worthless.
“The medical literature isn’t as good as it used to be,” Dr Casadevall said. “The culture of science appears to be changing. Less important work is being hyped, when the quality of work may not be clear until decades later when someone builds on your success to find a cure.”
In one recent study, researchers estimated that more than $28 billion, from both public and private sources, is spent each year in the US on preclinical research that can’t be reproduced, and the prevalence of these studies in the literature is 50%.
“We have more journals and more papers than ever,” Bowen said. “But the number of biomedical publications has dramatically outpaced the production of new drugs, which are key to improving people’s lives, especially in areas for which we have no good treatments.”
Dr Casadevall said he doesn’t doubt that more cures for diseases are out there to be found, and a more efficient system of biomedical research could help push along scientific discovery.
“Scientists, regulators, and citizens need to take a hard look at the scientific enterprise and see which [problems] can be resolved,” he said. “We need a system with rigor, reproducibility, and integrity, and we need to find a way to get there as soon as we can.”