Beyond the bottom line: Measuring the public value of biomedical research

This year, when the budget of the National Institutes of Health was cut for the first time in its 138-year history, the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University brought together researchers and policymakers to ask a critical question: How should we measure the outcomes of publicly funded biomedical research?

Part of CSPO’s fall 2025 “Rethinking Outcomes” series in Washington, D.C., Jeffrey Alexander, director of innovation policy at the Research Triangle Institute, presented findings from a rare, decades-spanning analysis of NIH intramural research licensing during a Sept. 24 seminar. His message: The true value of public research cannot be captured by commercialization alone.

“The attempt to calculate the financial return on investment on federal research is misleading, misguided and incomplete,” Alexander said. “The primary benefits are about improving public health, strengthening the biomedical enterprise and advancing knowledge for the public good.”

While most of NIH’s $35 billion budget supports extramural grants to universities and medical centers, about $5 billion funds its lesser-known intramural research laboratories. There, federal scientists have developed discoveries that underpin some of the most important medical advances of the last half-century:

• HPV vaccine Gardasilm, developed at NIH, has prevented an estimated 250,000 cervical cancer deaths worldwide.
• Velcade, a treatment for multiple myeloma, has reduced hospital stays for patients and cut absenteeism by nearly a week per year.
• COVID-19 vaccine technology, patented by NIH and used in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, has generated billions in revenue and protected millions of lives.

From 1981 to 2021, NIH-licensed inventions generated about $130 billion in product revenues and supported more than 74,000 jobs annually.

However, economic returns tell only part of the story. Alexander explained that the most widely licensed NIH inventions are not medicines but research tools such as cell lines, reagents and animal models used daily in laboratories around the world.

“These research tools don’t generate blockbuster revenues,” he said, “but without them, today’s biomedical innovations wouldn’t exist. They are mission-oriented impacts that go well beyond commercialization.”

Despite generating royalties of $1.7 billion over 40 years, Alexander warned against measuring NIH’s impact based strictly on financial returns. He emphasized that public health gains, expanded research capacity and global knowledge-sharing are harder to measure but more central to NIH’s mission.

“Researchers themselves often don’t even know the ultimate impact of their work,” he explained. “That’s why we need better data — and better stories — to explain why public research matters.”

Arthur Daemmrich, CSPO director, stressed that the study’s findings are timely: “For the first time in its history, NIH has seen serious cuts and a reassessment of what it supports. It’s critical that we understand not just the number of patents or the size of royalties but the broader societal impact of this research.”

The seminar where the study's findings were discussed kicked off the "Rethinking Outcomes" series, which will continue with sessions on biosafety, diversity in research, and how to measure and communicate societal impacts.

More information about this seminar and the series can be found on the CSPO website.