Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Life Sciences Investment Tracker?
The Life Sciences Investment Tracker is a data‑driven dashboard that measures the impacts of policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act’s healthcare provisions on life sciences investment, research, and development, with special attention to the impacts of the small molecule penalty. The tracker is designed to educate policymakers, stakeholders, and the public about how policy can negatively impact life sciences R&D, stifle innovation, and delay treatments.
How is information for the tracker selected?
The tracker includes data from SEC filings, earnings reports, company press releases, federal clinical trials data, and FDA data on orphan designations and approvals. More information on our methodology is available here.
How often is the tracker updated?
The tracker is updated on a monthly basis based on data from SEC filings, quarterly earnings reports, company announcements, the federal clinical trials database, and FDA data on orphan drug designations and approvals.
Does the tracker solely focus on the United States? Are there global impacts beyond what the tracker captures?
The tracker is intentionally scoped to identify impacts to companies doing business in the United States, but the full effects of policies that threaten life sciences research reach much further. R&D decisions at global companies often hinge on U.S. policy because the United States remains the largest drug development market and often sets regulatory and policy precedents. As a result, some large multi-national company announcements are included in the tracker.
How is the Inflation Reduction Act influencing investment changes in the life sciences?
Enacted in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions that established a process for Medicare to negotiate a “maximum fair price” for certain drugs. Under the law, small molecule drugs are subject to price-setting four years sooner than large molecule “biologics.” This four-year gap — referred to as the “pill penalty” — is motivating investors and companies to favor biologics over small molecule drugs.
The tracker puts firm data behind a well-known concern: when policy changes undermine the expected return on investment in biopharma R&D, capital dries up, drug pipelines shrink, and researchers exit the field. The tracker documents this pattern across the industry — from discovery to late-stage clinical trials. Even incremental policy shifts can sour investor sentiment, forcing companies to make tough decisions to cut their losses and walk away from promising research.
How do we know that these changes are the result of the U.S. policy environment rather than market drivers?
Policy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The U.S. policy environment directly influences the market. In some cases, companies that have directly attributed cutting small molecule R&D to the IRA. In other cases, we can connect the dots between a company publicly stating that the IRA may force them to reconsider their research portfolios and then, within weeks or months, subsequently discontinuing research for reasons other than safety, efficacy, or clinical concerns.
Macro investment trends also illustrate how policies like the IRA are driving decisions in the market. For example, small molecule funding dropped 68% since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Rare disease companies similarly lost more than $1.2 billion in value between December 2020 and February 2025.
Why does the tracker count discontinued research programs, but not new research programs that started in the same timeframe?
The tracker is designed to measure attrition, not activity. A canceled study or shelved program leaves a paper trail that can be tracked and verified. By contrast, new research programs are often announced with little financial detail, may be contingent on later milestones, and frequently overlap with projects that were already in motion before the policy shock we are tracking. Including them would blur a clean signal with a noisy one — we’d be mixing solid, confirmed losses with uncertain, hard-to-track beginnings.
