Half of all drugs developed in the US have links to the type of research that is under threat from Donald Trump¡¯s cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, according to a new paper.

With the president?significantly reducing the NIH budget from $47.4 billion (?35.2 billion) in 2024 to about $28.4 billion, researchers have examined an ¡°alternative history¡± for how that 40 per cent drop would have affected innovation in previous decades.

They have identified which grants between 1980 and 2007 were in the bottom 40 per cent of the funding priority queue and would likely not have been funded under a reduced NIH budget and linked these to drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Of the 557 drugs approved between 2000 and 2023, 40 (7 per cent) of them have at least one patent that directly acknowledges NIH funding, and 14 acknowledge funding from a grant that researchers believe would have been ¡°at risk¡±.

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Since 2000, 65 new drug approvals (12 per cent) were highly linked to this at-risk research. And 286 (51 per cent) referenced research funded by grants that would have been cut under a 40 per cent budget reduction.

Overall, the paper, published in the?, found that drugs linked to at-risk research or grants were no less valuable or impactful than others.

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Experts have previously warned?that the ¡°unprecedented¡± funding cuts on the NIH have caused chaos in science and will put lives at risk in the long term.

Biomedical innovation?has contributed to significant health improvements in the US. According to the paper, a large share of these gains can be attributed to advances in medical technology ¨C of which the NIH has been the largest single funder in the world in recent decades.

Assuming that future years resemble the recent past, the paper suggests that the large reduction in NIH funding could curtail research linked to a large share of potential drug approvals.

Authors write that the benefits of research funded by NIH grants that would not have been funded in their ¡°alternative-history scenario¡± are widespread and diffuse.

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¡°Large cuts to NIH¡¯s permanent budget in the past would have resulted in substantially fewer medical innovations than we enjoyed in our actual history,¡± they say.

The paper also likely underestimated the full impact of NIH funding. The analysis ended in 2007 and did not include second-order connections, when an NIH-funded scientific discovery enables additional research that in turn leads to drug development.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com