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Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen: "Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1] and from Bayer: "To mitigate some of the risks of such investments…
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ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced. only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3] [Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.” He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly." That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1 [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.416#pre...