From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Sun Mar 09 2003 - 17:23:34 MST
I sent this to wta-talk and thought folks on extropians would be
interested in these numbers as well.
From: Reason [mailto:reason@exratio.com]
> Are there any funding comparisons or dollar figures across
> the industry out there that you're aware of? I did some
> digging, but turned up a blank.
The real money comes from the NIA and from industry. It's a little
tricky to define how much of that is spent on real anti-aging
research, though. The NIA's total budget for 2003 is close to $1
billion. But a lot of that goes to research on specific aging related
diseases like Alzheimer's. I would guess that maybe 10% at most
goes into research in affecting the fundamental rate of aging. So
that's about $100 million / year. I could be drastically off on this
percentage though - it's just a guess.
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies can spend up to $1 billion
developing a single drug. So does research on drugs for cancer and
heart disease count? I wouldn't count it. I know of a handful of
companies working on techniques to directly slow the aging process,
but I don't know of a lot of funding activity other than the recent
funding of Elixir / Centagenix, which was an $18 million investment.
Alteon and Geron are both working on interesting technology that at
least has potential in aging, if somewhat indirectly. Together
they'll probably spend $40 million on R&D this year.
By contrast, the Buck Trust gives the Buck Institute about $5.5
million.
I don't know how much the Elisson Foundation is spending, but they
made 10 grants to prominent researchers in aging in 2002. If those
grants were on the order of $1 million / year / researcher, that would
be $10 million. That's probably a high estimate. I'd guess the real
number is closer to $5 million.
So, as you can see, the NIA and private industry are really where the
money for research comes from.
mez
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Mar 09 2003 - 17:29:12 MST