每年在全球范围内，大约2700亿美元投资于生物医学和健康研究。但是这值得吗？
This may be a facile question to some – clearly it is worth it: average life expectancy in England isexpected to rise to the late 80’s by 2030,癌症survival ratesin developed countries are improving, and a number of killer infectious diseases – such aspolio– are on the verge of being wiped out.
但是，这些情绪化的论点的吸引力有限，与那些在财务部中拥有钱包的人。他们会指出，可以在其他地方进行270B美元的投资 - 改善儿童的学校教育，为老年人投资社会护理，加强国家安全或建造新的道路和铁路系统。
为了应对这些理性的论点，并为研究提供理由，重要的是要通过估计研究的经济回报来说金融语言。
In a series of papers, the last of which was recently published in健康Research Policy和Systems，我们试图估计生物医学和健康研究的经济回报。我们分析了两个主要要素：英国相关研究的货币化健康收益，以及对英国国内生产总值（GDP）的更广泛影响。
为了评估健康收益的回报，我们首先估计了在三个不同领域的研究上花费的公共（政府和慈善机构）的数量 -心血管疾病（CVD）,癌症和musculoskeletal disease (MSD)。然后，我们估计研究投资与研究产生的净货币福利（NMB）之间的过去时间。这被计算为应归因于国家研究投资的健康收益的净值净值，减少了为基于研究的关键临床干预措施列表提供健康益处的成本。
This health benefit arising from biomedical and health research was measured and monetarized through Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). A QALY is a measure of the health of a person or population which incorporates both length of life and the quality of that life, so one QALY is equal to 1 year of life in full health. We valued QALYs based on an estimate of how much it costs the UK National Health Service (NHS) to generate an extra QALY (with a base case of £25k).
使用这四个关键要素的数据,我们可以then attribute a proportion of the annual NMB of the health gain as being due to UK research, and relate an equal number of years of investment to years of NMB, ‘lagged’ by an estimate of the average time between research and benefit. The return is expressed as an internal rate of return (IRR), which is effectively the discount rate that would yield a zero net present value. For CVD research this produced a best-case estimate of 9%, and when this approach was applied to cancer research and MSD research the respective IRR was 10% and 7%.
In afourth paperwe estimated the economic ‘spillover’ effects. The term ‘spillover’ is used by economists to describe an investment by one organization, public or private, that benefits other organizations in both the same and different sectors of the economy. For example, the decision byAstraZeneca to establish its global HQ in Cambridge, UK，对剑桥有经济影响。这项投资正在创造新的就业机会，增加了对住房的需求，鼓励其他公司共同设置，等等。
By looking at the relationship between public and private R&D investment (in economic terms, the elasticity), it was possible to show that every additional £1 of public spend on biomedical and health research is associated with an additional 99p of private R&D spend in the UK. By combining the estimated elasticity with previous estimates of the social rate of return from private R&D spend of around 50%, the best estimate IRR, in terms of impact on GDP of public biomedical and health research spend, was between 15% and 18%.
此外，研究的估计值估计是由研究产生的NMB，这将表明总回报了CVD，癌症和MSD研究约为25％（即健康增长约为10％，加上大约15％的GDP收益）。这意味着，在英国的医学研究上每一磅一磅，我们将获得GDP收益和健康增长的福利，相当于每年25便士。由于不同的方法论方法和缺乏研究，与其他公共部门的比较很困难，但是这些数字远远超过了政府通常对公共投资期望的6-8％的收益率。
应该强调的是，在提出这些估计值（如论文中所记录的那样）时，不可避免地会做出许多假设，并且它们反映了过去的绩效，并且不能保证相似的未来回报。
But those caveats aside, our work suggests that, to put it simply, public investment in biomedical and health research returns an impressive bang for your buck.
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