Corporate Support Cannot Make Up for Threats to the NIH Budget

From STAT First Opinion

Abstract

"Around 1990, a bright, young Harvard academic became interested in the possibility that a relatively unknown peptide might slow gastric emptying and reduce hunger — a potential boon to the treatment of diabetes. Although he was employed as a full-time faculty researcher and clinician at a major teaching hospital and his lab was funded by the National Institutes of Health, he chose to pursue this particular line of research privately with support from a large pharmaceutical company, which required him to keep the work secret and not publish his findings or present them at scientific meetings."

Summary

In this STAT News First Opinion essay, Jerry Avorn, MD, argues that pharmaceutical industry funding is a structurally inadequate substitute for federal investment in biomedical research through the NIH, and that replacing one with the other would cause lasting damage to the basic science pipeline from which genuinely innovative treatments emerge.

Dr. Avorn opens with a cautionary case study from approximately 1990, when a Harvard researcher chose to pursue a promising line of research — involving a peptide that could slow gastric emptying and reduce hunger — under a private contract with a pharmaceutical company rather than through public funding. The contract required secrecy: the researcher could not publish findings or present them at scientific meetings. The company ultimately failed to follow up on the discovery's enormous potential. That research, Dr. Avorn writes, was an early foothold on what became the GLP-1 class of drugs — now among the most significant therapeutic advances of recent decades. The 2024 Lasker Awards were given for the development of GLP-1 medications, much of it accomplished by other Harvard researchers through federal grants. The earlier, unpublished pharma-funded findings were never mentioned.

Dr. Avorn uses this episode to frame a broader argument about the Trump administration's threats to NIH funding and the suggestion, gaining traction in academic medical centers, that pharmaceutical industry support could fill the gap. He identifies several reasons this substitution cannot work at scale.

First, he writes, it simply won't scale financially. Before the administration's funding freezes and threatened cuts, the NIH was spending $48 billion annually on biomedical research. Pharmaceutical companies, despite their claims to be the primary engine of drug innovation, spend a far smaller share of revenues on innovative research than on promotion and marketing, stock buybacks, shareholder dividends, and executive compensation.

Second, and more fundamentally, the types of research industry funds are structurally different from what NIH supports. Drug company research is necessarily oriented toward patentable products, not the basic science from which future products will eventually flow.

Conducting studies of disease mechanisms that produce non-patentable results — what Dr. Avorn calls the "pre-competitive space" — is simply not a corporation's responsibility. By contrast, Dr. Avorn's own research, and that of others, has shown that the majority of important new breakthrough drugs had their origins in publicly supported research.

Third, private funding comes with constraints that are incompatible with the open dissemination of scientific findings. Industry-funded university research is frequently governed by nondisclosure agreements that can impede publication — either to preserve competitive advantage or to prevent the spread of findings that reflect unfavorably on a sponsor's product. "This is not the best way to advance science," Dr. Avorn writes.

Dr. Avorn acknowledges that productive industry-academic research collaborations do exist and have produced important work, provided they preserve the principles of open scientific communication. But he argues that even well-designed collaborations cannot compensate for the loss of NIH's peer-reviewed, publicly accountable funding — especially for early-stage, non-proprietary basic science.

The essay is written against the backdrop of specific funding actions. At Harvard, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars of research funding, ostensibly to address antisemitism. Dr. Avorn notes that the bulk of cuts have hit the schools of medicine and public health in Boston, despite the student protest events that triggered the government's action having occurred on the arts and sciences campus in Cambridge, three miles away. Similar off-target penalties have been threatened against Columbia and other research-intensive universities. The effects on frontline researchers, Dr. Avorn writes, have been devastating: laboratory experiments and clinical trials stopped mid-stream, established programs struggling to survive, and researchers — most of whom depend on "soft money" rather than guaranteed institutional salaries — facing uncertainty about their income in the months ahead.

Dr. Avorn concludes with a direct statement of the stakes: greater reliance on corporate largesse can never be a satisfactory alternative to a healthy, adequately budgeted source of peer-reviewed public support. The United States has been the engine of worldwide biomedical discovery and innovation because of its public research investment — a position that cannot be maintained by substituting private funding with its inherent constraints, conflicts of interest, and misalignment with the open science that drives true innovation.