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COVID-19

 

R&D Data & Dashboard to support the COVID-19 pandemic response

Updated 30 August 2020 with new data. Also see our output in Lancet Microbe which is our position paper for this activity-

Brown RJ, Head MG. Monitoring investments in coronavirus research and development. Lancet Microbe. 2020. DOI 10.1016/S2666-5247(20)30039-2

Also see our September 2020 paper -
Head MG et al. The Allocation of US$ 105 Billion in Global Funding for Infectious Disease Research between 2000 and 2017: An Analysis of Investments from Funders in the G20 Countries. The Lancet Global Health. 2020.

The Research Investments in Global Health study (RESIN) have put together an analysis of global public and philanthropic R&D investments related to coronavirus research. This covers the time period from the year 2000 – present day, and now particularly focuses on the funding for COVID-19 research . We have explored >1000 funders of health research to identify these studies. All funding amounts presented here are in US dollars.

Comments/feedback are welcome! And do explore the interactive dashboard of our findings!

We’d like to acknowledge the support of colleagues at Dimensions for access to their databases, this has been invaluable in developing the work of RESIN. For tracking COVID response, as well as our own searches, we are also using the UKCDR COVID response tracker.

 
 
 
 
 

Headline findings (as of 30 August 2020)

  • We’ve tracked global public and philanthropic funding for COVID-19 related research totalling $3.3 billion.

  • Number of COVID-19 awards – 2282 (1111 additional awards in this update)

  • In terms of products - there’s 103 separate noted awards totalling $2.2 billion devoted to vaccine development (with clearly much more than that invested from the private sector and any other sources that are not tracked here). That includes lump sum donations to CEPI (currently estimated at $1.1 billion) and from the US government for their own vaccine development ($955 million).

  • We’ve observed 183 awards and $128m investment in diagnostics research, and 294 awards covering $187m for therapeutics research.

  • £135m for behavioural and social sciences research across 734 awards, that’s 4.1% of the tracked funding but 31% of total awards. This category is very broad (and needs more nuance) but it includes for example people’s behaviour, attitudes, policy research, and society response.

  • £38m for research focusing on vulnerable groups across 136 awards, 1.2% of the tracked funding and 6.0% of total awards. ‘Vulnerable’ here refers to BAME groups in high-income countries, elderly, pregnancy, prisoners, homeless populations, and injecting drug users.

  • As of 30 August 2020, we have tracked 40 research awards from the European Commission, totalling $59m (50m euros). The UK led on none of these awards and were collaborators on 4 awards where funding totalled $20m (18m euros).

  • We will also work alongside the UKCDR data in identifying which of the WHO priorities are being addressed and where there appear to be global knowledge gaps.

 
 
 
 

Prior to 2020, the spend on coronavirus is approximately 0.5% of the total spend on all infectious disease research funding. For comparison purposes, $1.2b (1.1%) has been spent on Ebola-related research and $0.3b (0.3%) on Zika virus. See below for caveats and information about this data. Click here for the published paper in The Lancet Global Health.

When considering trends over time for all three of these diseases, the vast majority of the funding was awarded soon after each disease was identified as a public health emergency. Thus, we in the global health community are very reactive rather than proactive when it comes to funding and carrying out research. There has been some progress to change this, for example with CEPI, but we have seen that much more investment and infrastructure around pandemic preparedness is required.

 
 
 
 

Key RESIN publications to date

Here’s some example of a few of our key previous RESIN publications:

 
 
 
 

More about the data collected

Our pre-print covering the much larger ‘all infectious disease research funding’ dataset is now online (at the ‘invited to revise’ stage with the journal). Click here to see it. That manuscript contains a more in-depth look at how we’ve done this. However, here is a brief explanation of the methodology in putting the data together:

  • We’ve used databases such as Dimensions, Healthresearchfunders.org and a vast amount of manual searching of funders website and the internet, to collate data on individual awards that have been funded and focus on infectious disease research.

  • That’s all infectious diseases, ranging from fungal to viral disease from bacterial to parasites.

  • And it includes all types of science along the research pipeline, from pre-clinical studies in a laboratory, to clinical trials, public health and clinical research.

  • Through a mixture of keyword algorithms, and a lot of manual fine-tuning, we now have labelled each study with our categorisation system of individual keywords (essentially a bit like MESH terms).

  • The projects were funded by institutions based in the G20 countries. So that includes the US NIH, European Commission, Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and so on. Awards have been adjusted for inflation, and where required, currency-converted using the average exchange rate in the year of the award.

  • This has resulted in a dataset of 94000 awards, covering $105 billion. That dataset covers years 2000-2017 inclusive. It is through that dataset we, for example, have estimated the conclusion above of ‘0.5% of all infectious disease research funding’.

  • Through that dataset, we have here extracted all the coronavirus-related awards, and applied some extra analysis (for example, were the studies about MERS or SARS or general coronavirus R&D?)

  • We have additionally collected further data on coronavirus studies that were funded in 2018, 2019, and new awards from 2020 as they happen. (This new data collection is from any country, not focused on the G20 members).

  • So, the Ebola and Zika numbers above are covering 2000-2017. Coronavirus data is 2000 – 2020, and being continuously updated.

  • At time of writing, with the data 2000-2019, we cannot put the details of the individual awards online (due to data ownership from funding databases). So therefore aggregated summaries are available. For the 2020 data, if these are openly-published, we will indicate those award decisions here and link back to the source of that data.

  • Caveats apply around, for example, this does not include private sector data. And to note, we are focused on counting the R&D investments. Awards relating to, for example, donations of aid are not included here (can sometimes be tricky to distinguish between research and implementation activity).

 
 

COVID-19 WEBINAR

The webinar ‘COVID-19 webinar: Supporting the pandemic response - How has the University of Southampton stepped up?’ hosted by us and organised by Dr Michael Head, Senior Global Research Fellow from RESIN, had hundreds of attendees, who were informed how different University teams have been supporting the pandemic. The event was chaired by BBC Senior Reporter and Journalist, Zoe Kleinman and the speakers came from a range of backgrounds including medicine, medicine, geography, psychology and public health.