Changes in the political climate of the United States are spilling into scientific research. While many past administrations, of both parties, supported and funded science funding and education, the current administration has enacted cuts to currently funded research upwards of 40% and the proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year shows a 39.3% cut to NIH funding.
While this may not be initially concerning to most people who may ask how this could possibly impact their daily lives—it is a pressing concern when one considers the broader impacts of reduced research funding.
“Recently, when asked to assess how large NIH reductions would affect drug development, the Congressional Budget Office reported that its data and methods did not permit an estimate,” wrote the authors.
To quantify exactly what the impacts on biomedical research and innovation the reduced NIH funding might have, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Johns Hopkins University conducted an analysis of the publications cited in small-molecule drug patents to determine how many NIH funded projects were involved in the discovery and development of those drugs.
Their study, “What if NIH funding had been 40% smaller?” is published as a Policy Article in Science.
The NIH uses priority lists in determining funding status of project applications. Utilizing priority lists allowed the researchers to identify studies that were in the lower 40 percent of the NIH-funded projects based on priority. They dubbed these studies as “at-risk” projects based on the current and proposed funding cuts.
“The indirect connection is where we see the real breadth of NIH’s impact,” said coauthor Danielle Li, an economist at MIT. “What the NIH does is fund research that forms the scientific foundation upon which companies and other drug developers build.”
Analyzing data from priority lists covering the period from 1980 though 2007 in conjunction with new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the FDA between 2000 and 2023, the researchers aimed to cover the time span that it takes for basic research to progress to drug development.
The team surmised that “if few advances are connected to at-risk grants, it would suggest that a 40% NIH budget cut might have had limited consequences for drug development, implying less cause for concern about current proposed reductions.” However, if the patents have a strong basis in NIH-funded research, the opposite would hold true and the current concern would be validated.
At-risk grants were linked to NMEs both directly and indirectly. Direct connections included patents that explicitly acknowledge support from at-risk grants via their “government interest statements,” while indirect links were patents that included citations which acknowledged at-risk grants.
The team identified 557 drugs that were approved by the FDA between 2000 and 2023. Of these, 40, or 7.1%, directly acknowledged NIH-funding, and 14 acknowledged funding coming from an at-risk grant. Meanwhile, 331 drugs, 59.4%, were indirectly connected to NIH support, meaning that these patents cited at least one NIH-funded project. More than half of the drugs, 286 (51.4%) were connected to at-risk grants.
“What we found was quite striking,” said Li. “More than half of the drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 are connected to NIH research that would likely have been cut under a 40 percent budget reduction.”
There are many nuances to this work, which the authors acknowledge—some indirect research may have been pivotal to the development of a drug, but conversely, just because a NIH-funded paper is cited, doesn’t mean it was a linchpin. However, there were clear cases of direct links between at-risk grants that led to drug development.
Further, while this report shows a substantial impact of NIH funding on small-molecule drug development in the U.S., it is limited in its scope. Medical devices, vaccines, cell and gene therapies, diagnostics, and other biomedical therapies and practices were excluded in the present study. Inclusion of these missing pieces may show a higher impact of reduced funding on biomedical innovations.
The authors also point out that they were “unable to identify the (likely many) scientists whose careers would have been cut short without NIH support during their doctoral and postdoctoral studies.”
“The worry is that these kinds of deep cuts to the NIH risk that foundation and therefore endanger the development of medicines that might be used to treat us, or our kids and grandkids, 20 years from now,” Li said.
