It’s budget-cutting season in the US Congress, and the word is that science will take a hit along with everyone else.

So a new study of the benefits of federal spending in biomedical research is particulary timely. The study undercuts the conventional wisdom that academics are bad at drug discovery – an old chestnut that has been revived of late by debate over the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s new venture, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

The conventional wisdom says that academics are whizzes at elucidating the basic pathways and processes of life, but that when it comes to making treatments that target those pathways, they should step out of the way and let industry do its thing.

That conventional wisdom might be outdated, says a group of researchers, led by the NIH’s Mark Rohrbaugh, writing today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers put together a database of patent information for drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in the United States after 1962. They examined whether “public sector institutions,” such as universities and the NIH, had filed patents related to each of the approved drugs. They further classified whether the patents covered applied research, such as discovering a drug or a using a particular drug to treat a specific disease.

The researchers found that public sector applied research was involved in the development of 9.3 percent of new drugs approved from 1990-2007; higher than some previous estimates and lower than others.

But drugs first discovered in the public sector seemed to be disproportionately more innovative. The researchers measured this by tallying how many of the drugs approved from 1990-2007 were totally new drugs, rather than minor tweaks of existing drugs, and received priority review because they demonstrated “substantial improvement” over current treatments. They found that 21.2 percent of totally new drugs that received priority review were discovered in the public sector. So while the overall rate of drug approvals originating in the public sector is relatively small, these drugs tend to have “disproportionate clinical effect,” the authors write.

Ten to twenty percent of all drugs might seem a small number. But Ashley Stevens of Boston University, lead author of the paper, points out that federal spending isn’t devoted to drug discovery – it’s largely supporting basic research – and yet still generates substantial tangible benefits.

Stevens interprets his study as a warning to politicians who hope to trim federal research dollars.

“The NIH budget is not just an element of discretionary spending to be cut in tough budgetary times, but a source of relatively near-term impact on economic development and human health,” Stevens says.