Sabem que la innovació farmacèutica de l'any 2023 ha estat la primera teràpia aprovada d'edició genètica mitjançant CRISPR. Ara Vertex haurà de pagar una llicència de 100 milions pel cap baix a Broad Institute (Harvard) i al competidor Editas Medicine, per poder comercialitzar-la.
És un bon moment per preguntar-nos quina ha estat la contribució de finançament públic a la recerca, i per tant si cal considerar fins a quin punt el que s'ha patentat privadament s'ha assolit mitjançant recursos públics.
Això a hores d'ara és complicat de conèixer amb estimacions precises. Però mitjançant la revisió de tots els articles publicats i mirant els reconeixements i agraïments han construït aquest graf que explica prou bé d'on han vingut els recursos per a la recerca, i es veu que fonamentalment venen del govern (punts blaus) i de la filantropia (punts vermells). Aquest és la conclusió del graf referit a Harvard:
The bimodal network model of the Broad/Harvard/MIT system was formed by 28 organizations (12 governmental agencies and 16 philanthropic/charitable organizations) and 111 highly cited papers (14 papers on CRISPR as a biological phenomenon and 97 papers on the development of CRISPR/Cas technologies
Si cliqueu sobre el gràfic en podreu veure millor el contingut:
The three clusters are supported by the NIH, which occupies a central positionin the network model, but are cofunded by different sets or organizations. The cluster located in the lower right corner of the network model is formed by papers cofunded by the NIH and the Department of Energy (DoE); a second cluster (upper right corner) is cofunded by a set of philanthropic and governmental organizations; and the third cluster (upper left corner) is cofunded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) together with a set of U.S. military organizations or programs (Figure 3). There is also an important set of papers exclusively funded by the NIH.
the bimodal network model of the UC system was formed by 15 funding organizations (10 governmental agencies and five philanthropic/charitable organizations) and 117 highly cited papers (59 papers on CRISPR as a biological phenomenon and 58 papers on the development of CRISPR/Cas technologies
In the case of the University of California (UC), the cofunding network model (Figure 4) suggests that the top-cited investigations on CRISPR as a biological phenomenon, which is related to the discovery stage of investigation in which the basis of future technologies are built, were mostly supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. A relatively smaller and less cited set of papers was cosupported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund together with the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Figure 4). On the other hand, the investigations related to the development of CRISPR/Cas technologies at the UC were mostly supported by the NIH together with the National Science Foundation and the HHMI in two respective clusters of papers (Figure 4). There is also an important set of technological development papers funded by the NIH without the participation of other frequent governmental or philanthropic/charitable funding sources
