The Good News: Medical Research Spending Jumps
The Bad News: It's Mostly Useless

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, The Associated Press [excerpts; emphasis added]

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 study is part of a special issue of Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to the state of U.S. medical research. 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.

The imbalance between late-stage and early-stage research is growing, the authors wrote, and is due partly to lengthy clinical trials required for new drug approval and partly to pure marketing. Companies often run costly studies to show their drugs work better than competitors' drugs.

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. That proportion has remained unchanged over the past decade.

The analysis also found that the United States spends about six cents of every health care dollar on medical research. But the nation spends only one-tenth of a cent of every dollar on longer-term evaluation of which drugs and treatments work best at the lowest cost.