Funding by disease
By Impact Global Health 29 January 2025
Funding tables
Table 1. Disease and product R&D funding 2023 (US$ millions)
Table 2. R&D funding by disease 2014-2023 ^
R&D funding remained stable after last year’s $350m drop
Global funding for neglected disease basic research and product development was basically stable at $4.17bn in 2023, down by less than 1% ($29m) from 2022 – or by just under 2% ($70m) if we adjust for a slight net increase in survey participation. This failure to rebound from the big, inflation-driven fall in 2022 left global funding nearly $650m below its 2018 peak, and almost $150m below its average over the previous decade.
The largest falls, in absolute terms, were for HIV/AIDS (down $143m, -10%), bacterial pneumonia & meningitis (down $30m, -61%) and diarrhoeal diseases (down $20m, -12%), all reaching record lows. Mostly offsetting these were substantial increases for both TB (up $69m, 9%) and malaria (up $60m, 9%, partly thanks to new survey participants). Several traditionally less-funded diseases enjoyed substantial growth, including record funding for leprosy and snakebite envenoming, alongside near record totals for TB and dengue.
The impact of inflation was much smaller than in 2022, when it was responsible for the vast majority of the decrease in the value of funding. Nominal funding (unadjusted for inflation) rose by a little under 4%, with the effects of global inflation turning that into the very slight decline in real funding. So, while funding increased a little in pure dollar terms, the actual purchasing power of global funding declined slightly – though the size of the decline and the rate of inflation driving it were both significantly lower than in 2022.
In these disease sections, we occasionally omit some qualifiers for the sake of readability: we might talk about ‘funding for malaria’, for example, but our funding totals only ever refer only to R&D funding – not funding for malaria generally. Similarly, we might occasionally talk about ‘this year’s funding total’ in reference to funding for 2023 – the period covered by this year’s G-FINDER survey – and ‘last year’ therefore refers to 2022.
Figure 2: Total R&D funding for neglected diseases 2007-2023
Table of contents
- Smart Decisions: The G-FINDER 2024 Neglected Disease R&D report
- Introduction
- Funding by disease
- The 'big three' – HIV, TB & malaria
- Multi-disease groups – diarrhoeal diseases, kinetoplastids & helminths
- Diseases with moderate funding – dengue, Salmonella, snakebite, hepatitis B & C
- Diseases with little funding – leprosy, bacterial pneumonia & meningitis, cryptococcal meningitis, rheumatic fever & histoplasmosis
- Diseases with almost no funding – leptospirosis, scabies, Buruli ulcer, mycetoma, yaws & trachoma
- R&D for more than one disease – core funding, platforms, multi-disease vector control & Other R&D
- Neglected disease funders
- Discussion