In the third comment of this post over at Naked Capitalism there's a wealth of data on public vs private drug research funding:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2007/09/brazenness-of-big-pharma.html Here is the last piece: << [...] "Meanwhile, for more than 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry has been investing larger amounts in research and development than the federal government — $51.3 billion in fiscal year 2005,2 for instance, or 78 percent more than NIH funding that year. " You have to love the way these guys use numbers. That 78% number makes the gap seem much bigger. If you have a NIH budget of $28.8 billion and industry reported expenditures of $51.3 billion, that makes the NIH 35.6% of the total. And per the quote above, the NIH isn't the only part of the government that funds drug research, so citing the NIH data alone is misleading. Those are the official figures. I need to find the references that parse the industry data into what's relevant and not. Of course, if you simply shifted the value of the 35% tax deduction on that $51.3 billion from the "pharma spending" category to the government category, that puts government "spending" on R&D at 58.4% of the total. >> Is there any recent/serious research on what are the real share of public vs private drug research spending? An the real part of private spending in research vs advertizing (see the full comment). Thanks in advance, Laurent http://guerby.org/blog/
