Drugs: Research
(asked on 5th March 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding his Department has allocated to medical research for the development of new medicines in each of the last three years.
The Department funds research via the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
The types of biomedical and health related research that are funded by NIHR and other funders can be classified using the Health Research Classification System (HRCS). Whilst HRCS does not have a category that is specifically ‘new medicines’, HRCS codes 5.1 and 6.1 relate to the development and evaluation of pharmaceutical treatments and therapeutic interventions and can be used to classify NIHR Programme Spend. It is possible that these codes may include some evaluation of existing medicines.
In addition, the NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN) undertakes research which supports clinical trials into pharmaceutical treatments and therapeutic interventions. CRN funding data can be calculated based on the number of recruiting 'Clinical Trial of an Investigational Medicinal Product (CTIMP)' studies within the CRN Portfolio.
NIHR programme research spend classified under HRCS codes 5.1 and 6.1 and CRN CTIMP spend over the last three years where complete data is available is shown in the following table:
| 2014/15 | 2015/16 | 2016/17 |
NIHR Programme Spend | £34,204,157.67 | £36,655,975.32 | £39,011,490.62 |
CRN spend | £76,600,272.00 | £77,676,259.00 | £77,036,034.00 |
| £110,804,429.67 | £114,332,234.32 | £116,047,524.62 |
Research which may also contribute to the development and evaluation of pharmaceutical treatments and therapeutic interventions carried out across NIHR Infrastructure is not coded by the HRCS scheme so cannot be wholly attributed to individual research topics.