Investments in respiratory infectious disease research 1997–2010: a systematic analysis of UK funding

Head, Michael G; Fitchett, Joseph R; Cooke, Mary K; Wurie, Fatima B; Hayward, Andrew C; Lipman, Marc C; Atun, Rifat

The methods have been described in detail previously. 18 The overarching dataset was constructed by 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 Each study was screened for relevance to infectious disease research and assigned to as many primary disease categories as appropriate. 19 Within each category, topic-specific sub-sections (including specific pathogen or disease) were documented. Studies were also allocated to one of four categories along the R&D value chain: pre-clinical; phase 1, 2, or 3; product development; and implementation and operational research. Funders were either considered in their own right, or were grouped into categories, such as in-house university funding, research charities, and government departments. A total of 26 funder categories were used. 19 This categorisation was carried out by author MGH, with provisional datasets circulated to authors for review and comment, and JRF, MKC and FBW further verified a random sample of 10% of the dataset, with author agreement measured by a Kappa score (0.95) and differences settled by consensus. We excluded studies not immediately relevant to infection, veterinary infectious disease research studies (unless there was a clear zoonotic component), and studies where there were UK collaborators, but the funding was awarded to a non-UK institution. Unfunded studies were also excluded. Grants awarded in a currency other than pounds sterling were converted to UK pounds using the mean exchange rate in the year of the award. All awards were adjusted for inflation and reported in 2010 UK pounds.