3 Questions: Pierre Azoulay on the value of funding the NIH
Public funding of biomedical research totals more than $30 billion annually. Does it pay off? A new study co-authored by MIT’s Pierre Azoulay, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, finds that it does, in spades: Every $1 in public funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the study finds, yields roughly $2 in private-sector pharmaceutical drug sales. That doesn’t even include basic research that paves the way for more drug-specific studies, notes Azoulay, who has written a new working paper on the subject, along with scholars Joshua Graff Zivin, Danielle Li, and Bhaven N. Sampat. MIT News sat down with Azoulay to discuss the results. Q. What is your bottom-line finding about the results of NIH-funded biomedical research? A. What we find is that there are significant downstream spillovers coming from publicly funded biomedical research. The magnitude is that roughly every three grants of average size in the average research...