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Scientists say they have developed a tool that can guide the allocation of resources for biomedical research in an unbiased way.
The tool, called the Research Opportunity Index (ROI), measures disparities between resources dedicated to a disease and its relative burden on society.
This reveals diseases that receive a disproportionate share of resources and opportunities for high-impact investment or the realignment of existing resources.
The ROI was designed to provide an unbiased, data-driven framework to help scientific and political communities assess resource investment and identify unmet medical needs.
The tool is described in a letter to Nature Biotechnology.
“The misalignment of resources in biomedical research could be likened to poor budgeting of household finances,” said Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD, of the University of Chicago in Illinois.
“It would be bad to spend all your money on food, for example, and have nothing for rent. Resources are finite, and attention to each problem, ideally, should be proportional to the need.”
With this in mind, Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues created the ROI. They used it to estimate the societal burden of 1400 medical conditions in the US over a 12-year timespan, based on frequency of diagnosis and healthcare insurance costs, as well as research publications, awarded grants, and clinical trials for each condition.
The tool revealed misalignments, which allowed the scientists to create an “investment portfolio” of the resources dedicated to each disease, relative to its burden on the US healthcare system.
The team found that breast cancer, for example, stands out as a disease with higher dedicated resources than its relative societal burden. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is among the conditions with the most investment potential.
While Hashimoto’s disease has nearly the same incidence among women as breast cancer, there were only 16 open clinical trials for Hashimoto’s disease as of August 2015, according to a list on clinicaltrials.gov. Breast cancer had 2205 open trials.
Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues acknowledge that the question of what makes a condition more deserving of funding than any other ailment is complex and multifaceted. But the team hopes this new tool can aid decisions on how best to allocate funds and other resources.
By providing a framework based on unbiased quantitative analytics and big data, they hope to identify diseases that are high-impact and rewarding targets for additional investment.
“Some diseases stick in the public’s attention,” Dr Rzhetsky said. “We have a distorted map of the frequency and importance of events from media and articles, and, without special efforts to reconcile the reality, we are inherently biased.”
The team is now working to incorporate other models of funding distribution into their tool to account for additional variables.
For example, the “trendy model,” which supports investment for diseases with large emotional impact, suggests that even though this reduces funding for other diseases, there may still be benefits as basic science discoveries are added to the scientific and medical community. 
Photo by Bill Branson
Scientists say they have developed a tool that can guide the allocation of resources for biomedical research in an unbiased way.
The tool, called the Research Opportunity Index (ROI), measures disparities between resources dedicated to a disease and its relative burden on society.
This reveals diseases that receive a disproportionate share of resources and opportunities for high-impact investment or the realignment of existing resources.
The ROI was designed to provide an unbiased, data-driven framework to help scientific and political communities assess resource investment and identify unmet medical needs.
The tool is described in a letter to Nature Biotechnology.
“The misalignment of resources in biomedical research could be likened to poor budgeting of household finances,” said Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD, of the University of Chicago in Illinois.
“It would be bad to spend all your money on food, for example, and have nothing for rent. Resources are finite, and attention to each problem, ideally, should be proportional to the need.”
With this in mind, Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues created the ROI. They used it to estimate the societal burden of 1400 medical conditions in the US over a 12-year timespan, based on frequency of diagnosis and healthcare insurance costs, as well as research publications, awarded grants, and clinical trials for each condition.
The tool revealed misalignments, which allowed the scientists to create an “investment portfolio” of the resources dedicated to each disease, relative to its burden on the US healthcare system.
The team found that breast cancer, for example, stands out as a disease with higher dedicated resources than its relative societal burden. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is among the conditions with the most investment potential.
While Hashimoto’s disease has nearly the same incidence among women as breast cancer, there were only 16 open clinical trials for Hashimoto’s disease as of August 2015, according to a list on clinicaltrials.gov. Breast cancer had 2205 open trials.
Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues acknowledge that the question of what makes a condition more deserving of funding than any other ailment is complex and multifaceted. But the team hopes this new tool can aid decisions on how best to allocate funds and other resources.
By providing a framework based on unbiased quantitative analytics and big data, they hope to identify diseases that are high-impact and rewarding targets for additional investment.
“Some diseases stick in the public’s attention,” Dr Rzhetsky said. “We have a distorted map of the frequency and importance of events from media and articles, and, without special efforts to reconcile the reality, we are inherently biased.”
The team is now working to incorporate other models of funding distribution into their tool to account for additional variables.
For example, the “trendy model,” which supports investment for diseases with large emotional impact, suggests that even though this reduces funding for other diseases, there may still be benefits as basic science discoveries are added to the scientific and medical community.
Photo by Bill Branson
Scientists say they have developed a tool that can guide the allocation of resources for biomedical research in an unbiased way.
The tool, called the Research Opportunity Index (ROI), measures disparities between resources dedicated to a disease and its relative burden on society.
This reveals diseases that receive a disproportionate share of resources and opportunities for high-impact investment or the realignment of existing resources.
The ROI was designed to provide an unbiased, data-driven framework to help scientific and political communities assess resource investment and identify unmet medical needs.
The tool is described in a letter to Nature Biotechnology.
“The misalignment of resources in biomedical research could be likened to poor budgeting of household finances,” said Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD, of the University of Chicago in Illinois.
“It would be bad to spend all your money on food, for example, and have nothing for rent. Resources are finite, and attention to each problem, ideally, should be proportional to the need.”
With this in mind, Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues created the ROI. They used it to estimate the societal burden of 1400 medical conditions in the US over a 12-year timespan, based on frequency of diagnosis and healthcare insurance costs, as well as research publications, awarded grants, and clinical trials for each condition.
The tool revealed misalignments, which allowed the scientists to create an “investment portfolio” of the resources dedicated to each disease, relative to its burden on the US healthcare system.
The team found that breast cancer, for example, stands out as a disease with higher dedicated resources than its relative societal burden. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is among the conditions with the most investment potential.
While Hashimoto’s disease has nearly the same incidence among women as breast cancer, there were only 16 open clinical trials for Hashimoto’s disease as of August 2015, according to a list on clinicaltrials.gov. Breast cancer had 2205 open trials.
Dr Rzhetsky and his colleagues acknowledge that the question of what makes a condition more deserving of funding than any other ailment is complex and multifaceted. But the team hopes this new tool can aid decisions on how best to allocate funds and other resources.
By providing a framework based on unbiased quantitative analytics and big data, they hope to identify diseases that are high-impact and rewarding targets for additional investment.
“Some diseases stick in the public’s attention,” Dr Rzhetsky said. “We have a distorted map of the frequency and importance of events from media and articles, and, without special efforts to reconcile the reality, we are inherently biased.”
The team is now working to incorporate other models of funding distribution into their tool to account for additional variables.
For example, the “trendy model,” which supports investment for diseases with large emotional impact, suggests that even though this reduces funding for other diseases, there may still be benefits as basic science discoveries are added to the scientific and medical community.