The Secret Sauce of US Biomedical Innovation
August 4, 2025
Despite proposals to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, the agency remains the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. Last year, NIH dispersed most of its $47 billion budget to more than 12,000 researchers at universities and other institutions around the country.
Less well-known is NIH’s intramural research program, which includes scientists at its labs and a 240-bed research hospital. Jeffrey Alexander and Rossana Zetina-Beale studied the program and found that not only has the program produced life-saving treatments, but technologies it licensed generated sales of $133 billion between 1980 and 2021. The intramural program is a keystone in the country’s thriving biomedical research ecosystem: “Inventions at NIH form the basis of completely new therapeutics and devices, and they also provide key research capabilities used to develop new drugs and interventions, as well as technologies to accelerate research translation.”
By making available fundamental resources and tools needed for drug development, NIH’s intramural research program provides critical advantages to the American biomedical innovation system. These benefits, Alexander and Zetina-Beale note, would be difficult or impossible to achieve through commercial or academic research alone.