Investment declines but overall R&D picture for diseases such as tuberculosis hailed as “reassuring”
Global funding for the clinical development of treatments for neglected diseases such as malaria fell by $124 million in 2020, a 10 per cent drop on the previous year, according to an extensive report.
Overall investment in research on neglected diseases fell by 4 per cent in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the analysis reveals.
Nick Chapman, chief executive of Policy Cures Research, the non-governmental organisation behind the report, said that despite the overall decline in investment, funding for neglected diseases had remained largely stable during a turbulent year for research and despite changed funding priorities due to the pandemic.
“These figures are reassuring for the neglected disease R&D community as they indicate continued commitment to advancing health innovations for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations,” he said. “However, we can’t assume that resilient funding in the first year of the pandemic means that we are safe from impacts on funding in the future.”
“Tackling Covid-19 continues to compete with neglected disease R&D for funders’ attention and resources, and there remains the risk that future fiscal contractions may reduce governments’ neglected disease budgets,” he added.
Public and private drops
The G-Finder report is a detailed analysis of global investment in R&D for products aimed at preventing, controlling and curing neglected diseases in the global south. It looks at diseases that have a disproportionate impact on people living in developing countries, where there is a need for new products to tackle them and an insufficient commercial market to attract industry R&D investment.
The report is published every year and goes out to policymakers, donors, researchers and industry members to demonstrate the extent of research taking place on diseases such as HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.
The latest edition, released last month, shows that both public and private sector contributions to neglected disease R&D dropped slightly in 2020, with investments by multinational pharmaceutical companies in clinical development decreasing for the second consecutive year.
Funding made available through philanthropic donations rose to its highest level since 2008, however, with an increase in investment by $28m in 2020 compared with 2019.
In 2020, the total reported global funding for basic research and product development for neglected diseases was $3,937m, a decrease of 4.2 per cent ($172m) from 2019.
“After funding remained mostly unchanged in 2019,” the report says, “the decline in 2020 reverses some of the three years of growth we observed between 2016 and 2018.”
Despite the overall decline, R&D funding for neglected diseases still sits at its third-highest point since the G-Finder report was first launched in 2007. But the latest analysis suggests that individual research areas are suffering, and experts warn that the full effects of the pandemic on research funding could be revealed when data from 2021 and future years are available.
Disease areas
Of the research areas to lose out on funding in 2020, HIV/Aids research saw its largest-ever decline, with funding falling by $132m, an 8.8 per cent drop on 2019.
Diarrhoeal diseases received $151m in funding for basic research and product development in 2020, a 13 per cent ($22m) drop from 2019 and a second consecutive year of declining funding, taking funding in this area to its lowest level in the past decade.
Tuberculosis research funding fell by 4.6 per cent and malaria funding fell by 2.3 per cent.
Funding for some disease research areas rose, including hepatitis B, which saw funding rise to $18m in 2020, a 26 per cent increase on 2019. The disease was responsible for 510,000 deaths in 2019.
A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe