Creating an alternative history: What if NIH had been 40% smaller? (biomedical research economics)

What if NIH funding had been cut years ago?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has undergone some major changes under the leadership of (HHS) Secretary. While no one knows exactly what the effects will be, reconsidering the past might indicate what could happen for drug development. A group of authors proposed a “what if” scenario to examine what might have happened over the last 25 years if the National Institutes of Health had a 40% funding cut from 2000 onward. Here’s a summary of the study published in Science.

... in the largest sample of medical advances for which we have good data (post-2000 small-molecule drug approvals), we found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced. Assuming that the near term resembles the recent past, our analysis indicates that substantial NIH budget cuts—including those implemented at the funding margin—could curtail research linked to a large share of potential drug approvals.