Daily Archives: August 8, 2018

Who benefits from research and innovation?

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I’ve been pondering a report written by my friend and Industrial Strategy Commission colleague Richard Jones (with James Wilsdon), The Biomedical Bubble. The report calls for a rethinking of the high priority given to biomedical research in the allocation of research funding, and arguing for more attention to be paid to the “social, environmental, digital and behavioural determinants of health”. It also calls for health innovation to be considered in the context of industrial strategy – after all, in the NHS the UK has a unique potential market for healthcare innovations. It points out the there are fewer ill people in the places where most biomedical and pharmaceutical research is carried out, thanks the the UK’sregional imbalances. It also points out that, despite all the brilliant past discoveries, the sector’s productivity is declining:

“In the 1960s, by some measures a golden age of drug discovery, developing a successful
drug cost US$100 million on average. Since then, the number of new drugs developed per
billion (inflation adjusted) dollars has halved every nine years. Around 2000, the cost per
new drug passed the US$1 billion dollar milestone, and R&D productivity has since fallen
for another decade.”

All of this seems well worth debating, for all its provocation to the status quo – and this is a courageous argument given how warm and cuddly we all feel about new medicines. I firmly believe more attention should be paid to the whole system from basic research to final use that determines the distribution of the benefits of innovation, rather than – as we do now – treating the direction of research and innovation as somehow exogenous and worrying about the distributional consequences. This goes for digital, or finance, say, as well as pharma. What determines whether there are widely-shared benefits – or not?

Serendipitously, I happened to read a couple of related articles in the past few days, although both concerning the US. One was this BLS report on multi-factor productivity, which highlights pharma as a sectors making one of the biggest contributions to the US productivity slowdown (see figure 3). And this very interesting Aeon essay about the impact of financial incentives on US pharma research. It speaks to my interest in understanding the whole system effects of research in this domain. Given that this landscape in terms of both research and commerce is US-dominated, this surely makes the question of how the UK spends its own research money all the more relevant? As The Biomedical Bubble asks:

“[T]he importance of the biotechnology sector has been an article of faith for UK
governments for more than 20 years, even when any notion of industrial strategy in other
sectors was derided. So the failure of the UK to develop a thriving biotechnology sector
at anything like the scale anticipated should prompt reflection on our assumptions about
how technology transfer from the science base occurs. The most dominant of these is that
biomedical science would be brought to market through IP-based, venture capital funded
spin-outs. This approach has largely failed, and we are yet to find an alternative.”
For it seems the model is no longer serving the US all that well either – not economy-wide innovation and productivity, and not the American population, which has worth health outcomes at higher cost that any other developed economy. There are some challenging questions here, fundamentally: who benefits from research and innovation, how should the public good being funded by taxpayers be defined and assessed, and what funding and regulatory structures would actually ensure the gains are widely shared?