Doesn't quite work like that. Industry puts very little into basic "blue sky" research (especially in healthcare), which can be speculative, over the horizon stuff. Then when the research has moved on a little, industry wakes up to some development. They only get interested when there are matching government funding, or subsidy. eg. they'll happy to cover the stipend of a doctoral student, or the salary of a postdoc, but they generally don't go in 100% because the risk is too high. Industry then licences in the tech from academia. The early stage research, in academia, is relatively low cost; you have students under the leadership of a principal investigator, making use of shared facilities. The research enjoys free overtime that industry doesn't get. The stipends of a doctoral student are much much lower than a salary for a new graduate. Postdocs don't get paid that much; when I was postdocc'ing in the late 90s, my salary was probably 40-50% of an industry role. Plus Postdocs will work unlimited hours, working weekends, for no extra pay. And, in the US, virtually no benefits. In academia, you can fund a postdoc for about $100k a year, comprising salary and overheads. In industry, and this is why looking at the spend is so distorting, costs ratchet up, with much higher overheads. I ran a team, in the defence sector (public company), about 10-11 scientists and engineers, a mix of PhDs and Masters, working on a product that was a spin from the military, that we were reconfiguring for healthcare (usually it goes the other way). We burnt through about $12-15m a year for 4 years. The core chemistry, which involved a means to manipulate and detect nucleic material, we licenced from a US university (not one of the top ones), where the PI had maybe 2-3 postdocs and a revolving door of PhD students. Industry R&D includes product development. Generally, academia are not developing products. In healthcare, academia generally doesn't pay the high costs to the CROs to run the trials, they don't have to pay for procurement and regulatory managers at quite an early stage of the project. They are not paying for the army of lawyers involved in negotiating those licencing and acquisition deals, covering new products and tech inserts. They don't have anyone involved in TAM analysis to work out the market analysis and route to market. They are not having to deal with 4-5 different regulatory bodies around the world. And Universities don't pay redundancy, which happens in about 60% of industry projects as they get shuttered. And your study is out of date. It won't tell you where that spend is occurring. Right now, there is so much going into AI, sucking the living daylights out of everything else. European Medtech used to way ahead of the US; it was relatively straightforward to gain MDD or IVDD CE compared to 510k or PMA, with the result that Europeans were able to gain access to the latest tech 7 years ahead of the US. New regulations in Europe have changed that, since politicians had it in their head that medical devices were unsafe (no evidence that EU market devices were less safe than US market devices), and so timelines are extending. The really interesting place, for healthcare, is China. They are a Command Economy, so when their leadership declares that by 2030, 90% of the Chinese healthcare market will be Chinese, they will probably get there. Interestingly, rather than making it simply easier for Chinese companies to get products to market (which in the past has resulted in outdated products), instead, they are targetting the most innovative companies, and accelerating approvals (the US does this, its called De Novo approvals, UK is starting to do this). One rule; companies cannot be working with foreign companies. They want 100% Chinese solutions (frankly, in healthcare, device and drug efficacy is very population dependant, eg, breast cancer etiology in Europe and US is very different from China, Japan). The result is some genuinely interesting solutions being developed. Without a healthy academic sector, you won't have innovation in industry. Its the seed for those idea. Your simplistic reading of that report fails to understand anything about scientific research. Likely you've never worked in the area. These days, I am out of the lab. I am a director of research, 6 figure London salary, doing ok, and advising industry, and government, where to put their money with respect to healthcare. Yes, digital therapeutics are there, but we are also looking at synthetic organs etc. What Pharma is scared of at the moment is neuro-implants, devices that can compensate for loss of function, eg dementia. Pharma can spend 15-20 years on a pipeline drug, and it fails in trials. Medtech can potentially field a device, 6-8 years, and it is derisked before the trials. That is enormously disruptive In my 30 year career, I have covered the whole gamut; starting off in marine microbiology down in Antarctica, climate biogeochemistry in the Gulf of Mexico, microbial ecology in Ireland, infectious disease stand off detection during the GWOT, COVID pandemic advising, to identifying innovation in medtech, and most recently, unpicking the medtech supply chain as it shifts from efficiency to resilience (healthcare is going to get a LOT more expensive).
