The U.S. is quickly losing ground as the global leader in medical innovation and must address the issue at the highest levels of government according to a new study prepared by Battelle. The study titled “Gone Tomorrow? A Call to Promote Medical Innovation, Create Jobs, and Find Cures in America” was commissioned by the Council for American Innovation (CAMI). The Council with Dick Gephardt as Chairman is a partnership aimed at urging Congress to adopt a national policy agenda on medical innovation.
For more than a year, CAMI met with experts, including entrepreneurs, innovators, clinicians and patient advocates in communities across the U.S. to understand the challenges faced by those working to advance medical innovation. Based on information obtained, CAMI commissioned Battelle to identify and highlight the best public policy ideas, so that CAMI can bring this information to Congress and to the Obama Administration.
According to the experts, the U.S. medical innovation ecosystem needs:
• White House level leadership that will lead to collaborative efforts to address key challenges
• Public-private collaborations to bridge the gap that exists between early-stage research often funded through public sources, and later stage development projects funded by private-sector sources. This gap currently delays the availability of new life-saving medicines, treatments, and technologies
• To strengthen investments in R&D and manufacturing to foster job growth and competitiveness, Congress needs to make the federal R&D tax credit permanent and adopt tax economic incentives to help boost manufacturing
• To enhance regulatory sciences efforts at FDA by calling on federal leaders to strengthen and meaningfully fund a collaborative effort to develop a regulatory sciences roadmap to advance existing efforts to bring the best science forward
• To increase the U.S. biosciences talent pool by providing federal support for the biosciences through K-12 science, and support for technology, engineering, and mathematics educational efforts, plus support to enhance bioscience teacher professional development
Go to www.americanmedicalinnovation.org/sites/default/files/Gone_Tomorrow.pdf to download the full report.
