$42B of NIH research each year, but Chronic Disease remains uncured

foodishealth.substack.com

4 points·jcarterwil··3 comments

Headline makes it seem as if all the budget was spent on curing chronic disease. Also implicit is the assumption that one should throw more money to solve a problem. It's not always the money, but unable to procure the right insight by the right folks.

Despite spending more than $42B each year at NIH, chronic disease continues to grow. How do we now focus on research that ends Chronic Disease?

GLP-1s and their successors for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and addiction (to counter Western disease from diet) and vaccines and immunotherapy for cancers (many cancers appear to be caused by viruses [1]). How you incentivize the scaled production of “healthy” foods in this macro seems intractable unfortunately, but patching reward centers around food macro and quantity consumption and cancer prevention via vaccines takes us a long way [2] [3].

Eli Lilly is seeking FDA approval for orforglipron, a once daily pill that is as effective, safe and tolerable to take as injectable semaglutide [4]. "Just think about the idea of having a pill that can be distributed anywhere in the world, that doesn't need to be refrigerated," Aronne told CBS News. "It's as effective as one of the injectable drugs we have now: Semaglutide. That is a big deal."

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/infections/inf...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/data-research/facts-stat...

[3] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eli-lilly-glp-1-pill-trial-fda-...

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