Health ROI as a measure of misalignment of biomedical needs and resources
With a growing demand and a diversity of health problems on the one hand and finite resources on the other, scientists and funding agencies are faced with difficult choices about which conditions to study and cure. In this Correspondence, we liken investment in understanding disease and discovering remedies to trades in a financial market. Research attention and funding, as traced by articles, grants and clinical trials, constitute subjective ‘prices’ that scientists and society pay for research on disease-specific therapies. In finance, the Black-Scholes-Merton model was introduced as a tool to estimate the intrinsic ‘value’ of stock options and guide capital investment. Here, we present a health research opportunity index (health ROI) to measure the misalignment of biomedical
needs and resources. Our health ROIs suggest where greater returns on investment in health research could be obtained for society.
Research Papers
- Profiling Reactive Metabolites via Chemical Trapping and Targeted Mass Spectrometry
- Does the brain listen to the gut?
- (Meta)genomic insights into the pathogenome of Cellulosimicrobium cellulans
- A robust adaptive denoising framework for real-time artifact removal in scalp EEG measurements
- Imputing Gene Expression in Uncollected Tissues Within and Beyond GTEx
- Small Rad51 and Dmc1 Complexes Often Co-occupy Both Ends of a Meiotic DNA Double Strand Break
- Controlling the Cyanobacterial Clock by Synthetically Rewiring Metabolism
- Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery
- The transcriptional landscape of age in human peripheral blood
- Digital signaling decouples activation probability and population heterogeneity
