Better measurement of the complementarity between UK public, charity and private medical research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Getting benefits from medical research in terms of preventing or treating illness, advancing scientific knowledge and generating economic wealth often, though not always, involves private industry. The private sector builds on and interacts with public and charity funded research and researchers; it conducts its own further research, develops and commercialises medicines and other technologies for use in health care. Theoretical and applied analyses so far published imply that public/charity funded medical research and private sector R&D are complements: extra spending on medical research stimulates extra private sector investment in R&D. But the only attempts to measure this complementarity so far have used US data and are somewhat out of date.RAND Europe and the OHE therefore propose to develop the methodology for estimating how many £s of pharmaceutical industry R&D are stimulated by an extra £ of public or charity funded medical research. We will improve on the econometric analysis used in the earlier US studies and create a UK, and up to date, dataset of public, charity and private pharmaceutical industry research spending in the UK, disaggregated into therapeutic areas.Time series data are available for total UK pharmaceutical industry R&D spending, but not broken down by therapeutic area. So we will construct estimated splits of spending by therapeutic area on the basis of two different proxies. First, we will use bibliometric analysis of peer reviewed research articles that have private sector authors based in the UK to estimate the relative weights given by the UK industry to different disease areas in its research. The necessary bibliometric database is available and permits analysis for each year from 1981 onwards. Second we will undertake a corresponding analysis of patents by therapeutic area, where that is evident, by year.To allow for likely differences between companies in their willingness to publish and their desire to patent, and given that different companies may focus on different therapeutic areas, we will explore the development of indices of companies' propensity to publish and propensity to patent. The indices will then be used to weight the publications and patents produced by those companies when using those data to proxy the split of pharmaceutical industry R&D spending.We will test the reasonableness of the proxies we develop for splitting total UK pharmaceutical industry R&D spend by therapeutic area via interviews with 12 senior company R&D managers in the UK (from the UK leading R&D companies), who will also be asked about the likelihood of, and the factors affecting, feedback from company R&D influencing public/charity research agendas.We will improve on analyses to date by separately analysing publicly funded medical research and charity funded medical research, not merely aggregating the two.We will also attempt to determine whether there is a measurable impact in the reverse direction, i.e. whether greater private pharmaceutical R&D investment stimulates greater charity or public medical research spending in similar areas.