Impacts of Changing Federal Funding on Biomedical Patents

Back in May, economists at Harvard estimated that proposed cuts to biomedical research would lead to less drug discovery and fewer biomedical patents. That's not surprising, but nevertheless I think it's worth taking a little time to think about what that means. The authors project that a 33% reduction in NIH funding would lead to about 15% fewer patents for new drugs. This then should lead to about 0.25 fewer years of life expectancy for Americans over the next 25 years. Altogether, that's about 82 million fewer years of life for us Americans. And because they're economists, they like to put a price tag on that, which they estimate at about 8.2 trillion dollars. That dwarfs the 500 billion dollars that would be saved by cutting the NIH budget by 43% (as the current administration has proposed) over the same time horizon - 25 years.

Overall, patent applications declined by about 9% in 2025, and patent grants fell by about 1%. The decrease in applications comes after seven years of growth in the number of patent applications. Now, most of those patents are from technology companies (e.g., Samsung, TSMC), not from biomedical companies. But I wouldn't be surprised if changes in federal funding in the United States is already starting to impact these trends. Already, growth in patents is shifting toward Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

As always, keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer. This post is for informational purposes only, and is not legal advice.