The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the largest public supporter of basic life science in the world.
With an FY2020 budget of $42 billion, most of their expenditures are university grants supporting either new discoveries or early-state clinical studies of promising treatments and diagnostic tests.
Since 1982, Congress has mandated that a fraction of the total annual NIH budget be put to work via grants or contracts to small life science and biotech companies rather than academic institutions.
Image: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash