Do National Funding Organizations Address the Diseases with the Highest Burden Adequately? Observations from the UK and China.

This paper is aimed to explore whether health research funding organizations have paid enough attention to the diseases with the highest burden. We studied the evolution of the hottest research topics through projects funded by the Department of Health Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) of the UK during 2006-2017, and compared the focus of these funded research projects against the diseases that carry the highest burden. The results indicate that both the NSFC and the MRC are greatly concerned with neoplasms and cardiovascular diseases, which do correspond to the top two families of diseases with the highest burden. Another family of diseases of common concern is diabetes and kidney diseases, which have shown an increasing trend in both burden and research attention since 2006. The MRC has funded a broader variety of disease research projects including those with significant impacts to the UK and some developing countries, such as mental disorders and neglected tropical diseases. The NSFC tends to fund projects that focus on the diseases with the highest burden to China, such as different kinds of neoplasms, but not to rapidly-spreading diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections, and mental disorders.