تاثیر تحقیقات بنیادی در نوآوری های صنعتی: شواهدی از صنعت داروسازی

While most economists believe that public scientific research fuels industry innovation and economic growth, systematic evidence supporting this relationship is surprisingly limited. In a recent study, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) identified market size as a significant driver of drug innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, but they did not find any evidence supporting science-driven innovation from publicly funded research. This paper uses new data on biomedical research investments by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine the contribution of public research to pharmaceutical innovation. The empirical analysis finds that both market size and NIH funded basic research have economically and statistically significant effects on the entry of new drugs with the contribution of public basic research coming in the earliest stage of pharmaceutical drug discovery. The analysis also finds a positive return to public investment in basic biomedical research.

In his 1990 Medalist Address to the Industrial Research Institute, Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, former President of Merck Research Laboratories, emphasized the importance of academic research as a source of new ideas fueling innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. In particular, he highlighted the contribution of university research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the discovery of new drugs using a variety of specific examples such as the discovery of Captopril and Proscar. The present paper generalizes existing case study research by examining the evidence for a systematic relationship between NIH investments into biomedical research performed in academic laboratories and pharmaceutical industry innovation. The belief that academic research creates new knowledge fueling technological opportunities has a long history in economics (Griliches, 1979, Griliches, 1992 and Klevorick et al., 1995). Growth theorists use the non-rivalrous nature of new knowledge to explain growth in income per capita and to introduce the possibility of increasing returns to scale (Aghion and Howitt, 2005 and Jones, 2005). In the empirical literature, Jaffe (1989) analyzed the production of corporate patents by region over time and found that academic research made a significant contribution. Jaffe's findings were reinforced when applied to a single year of data on innovations by Acs et al. (1991). Adams (1990) found that academic knowledge made a significant contribution to manufacturing productivity growth with a lag of up to thirty years on spillovers.1

Applying an econometric approach, this study found a systematic relationship between NIH investments into basic biomedical research performed in academic laboratories and pharmaceutical industry innovation. The preferred model implies a 1% increase in the stock of public basic research is associated with a 1.8% increase in the number of industry new molecular entity (NME) applications after a substantial lag. For an average NME, the lag between public investment and industry application is seventeen to twenty-four years. As interpreted through the lens of existing qualitative research, this time window identifies the occurrence of “enabling discoveries” in public basic research that build on and reflect a long history of prior research in both the public and private sectors. Combining the estimated magnitude and lag of public basic research with sales data for an average NME, the total direct return to public basic research is estimated to be 43%. While this estimate is subject to a number of caveats (see Section 5), it does show that the returns to public investment in basic biomedical research are positive. The results also show that industry R&D investment and potential market size are economically and statistically significant determinants of NME innovation. Industry R&D investment, however, cannot be modeled as strictly exogenous since NME innovations stimulate follow-on R&D investment.