G-FINDER 2022 Neglected Disease Research & Development report: The Status Quo Won't Get Us There

Global funding for basic research and product development for neglected diseases in 2021 was $4,137m, a drop of $44m (-1.1%) from 2020. There has been little change since 2018.

Three diseases – HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria – received the largest shares of funding. Funding for HIV/AIDS increased (up $39m, 2.7%) while malaria saw a substantial decrease (down $38m, -5.7%) and funding for tuberculosis remained basically unchanged (down $0.2m, -<0.1%). Just three other diseases saw meaningful increases in funding – snakebite envenoming, cryptococcal meningitis and scabies – alongside a further rise in non-disease-specific R&D – a seventh consecutive year of growth – leaving multi-disease funding up 5.6% with a new record total of $669m, and at 16% of global funding.

So global funding has remained essentially flat for three consecutive years. This failure to build on the long-term growth which delivered the 2018 peak has left funding around $400m lower than had it continued.

Funding for NTDs has been stagnating for more than a decade. We need a new model for attracting R&D funding to replace an existing approach which consistently fails to deliver investment at the scale required, even as global funding rises. Despite slight increases in funding from industry, there remains very little private sector interest, and, as a result, very little actual clinical development. So how, beyond our annual pleas for more public and philanthropic funding, do we close the gap between the $0.8m a year in existing investment and the kind of funding necessary to advance NTD products through the pipeline?