Limited alignment of publicly competitive disease funding with disease burden in Japan

Shuhei Nomura, Daisuke Yoneoka, Shiori Tanaka, Ryoko Makuuchi, Haruka Sakamoto, Aya Ishizuka, Haruyo Nakamura, Anna Kubota and Kenji Shibuya

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: Objective: The need to align investments in health research and development (R&D) with public health needs is one of the most important public health challenges in Japan. We examined the alignment of disease-specific publicly competitive R&D funding to the disease burden in the country. Methods: We analyzed publicly available data on competitive public funding for health in 2015 and 2016 and compared it to disability-adjusted life year (DALYs) in 2016, which were obtained from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study. Their alignment was assessed as a percentage distribution among 22 GBD disease groups. Funding was allocated to the 22 disease groups based on natural language processing, using textual information such as project title and abstract for each research project, while considering for the frequency of information. Results: Total publicly competitive funding in health R&D in 2015 and 2016 reached 344.1 billion JPY (about 3.0 billion USD) for 32,204 awarded projects. About 49.5% of the funding was classifiable for disease-specific projects. Five GDB disease groups were significantly and relatively well-funded compared to their contributions to Japan’s DALY, including neglected tropical diseases and malaria (funding vs DALY = 1.7% vs 0.0%, p

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0228542

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228542

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