Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the level of funding from the public purse to be allocated to research for medicines in each of the next three years.

The Department funds research via the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into a wide range of areas but does not usually ring-fence funds for particular topics. Awards are made in open competition on the basis of importance of topics to patients and heath and care services, value for money, and scientific quality judged through peer review. The amount of future NIHR funding in specific topic areas will depend on the quality and quantity of research proposals submitted to NIHR for review. As such, NIHR does not hold projected funding allocations specifically for research into medicines.

Information on individual projects funded by the NIHR can be found at:

https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/programmes/

However, NIHR does hold information on previous spend on the types of biomedical and health related research that are funded by NIHR and other funders, 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 set out below:

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.