The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending May 28, 2021 closed at 4,911.85 for the 25 companies in the R&D World Index. The Index was up 1.75% (or 83.97 basis points) from the week ending May 21, 2021. The stock of 14 R&D World Index members gained value from 0.31% (Novartis) to 9.00% (Ford Motor Co.). The stock of 11 R&D World Index members lost value from -0.07% (Eli Lilly & Co.) to -4.16% (Merck & Co.).
A district court in The Hague, The Netherlands, ruled last week that Royal Dutch Shell is partially responsible for climate change and must reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, compared with 2019 levels. The ruling stated that not only must Shell reduce its own direct emissions from drilling and other operations, but also those of the oil, gas and fuels eventually burned by consumers. Shell is headquartered in The Hague. Shell said it expects to appeal the decision. Also last week, an activist investor won its bid to install climate-friendly directors on Exxon Mobil’s Board of Directors. The International Energy Agency (IEA) also said that investments in new fossil-fuel projects must cease to reach a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
RDW Index member IBM last week announced it had formed a large-scale collaboration with The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to increase access to technology education and skill development, and to combine the strengths of academia and the industrial sector to spur breakthroughs in emerging areas of technology. Specifically, the collaboration will focus on hybrid cloud technologies and artificial intelligence, quantum information science and technology, accelerated materials discovery, and sustainability to accelerate discovery solutions for global challenges. The collaboration will be centered in the new IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute, housed within The Grainger College of Engineering at UIUC. It will be funded by a 10-year $200 million research investment from IBM and UIUC and complemented by major new building project to house appropriate research activities.
RDW Index member Ford Motor Company last week announced it plans to increase spending (including R&D) on electric vehicles to $30 billion by 2025, about a third more than it forecast earlier this year. The increase includes plans to eventually manufacture its own batteries in a collaboration with South Korea’s SK Innovation. To finance this enhanced investment, Ford said it plans to increase sales of EVs and services to commercial clients by two-thirds, to $45 billion by 2025. Ford also said its proprietary batteries, IonBoost, will allow it to reduce the cost of its battery packs by 40% by 2025.
Amgen’s lung cancer pill, Lumakras, was approved last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The drug was discovered in 2017 and put into clinical trials in 2018. The FDA approval was based on a mdi-stage study showing the drug helped control disease in 80.6% of patients. Amgen will have to complete a larger Phase 3 study to confirm the drug’s benefits under the FDA’s accelerated approval program. Other drugmakers are following Amgen’s lead in developing similar drugs for treating cancers.
RDW Index member Alphabet/Google announced last week that it has collaborated with HCA Healthcare to develop healthcare algorithms using patient records. HCA engineers will consolidate and store Google data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multiyear contract.
The World Health Organization (WHO) last week urged the United Nation’s member states to mandate a second phase of research to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 virus. The first phase was conducted earlier this year with UN researchers traveling to Wuhan China and then issuing an indecisive report. The WHO researchers asked the U.S. to share any intelligence supporting the hypothesis that the virus might have spilled from a research laboratory. President Biden last week ordered a closer intelligence review of whether the virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.
The Biden administration last week released a $1.53 trillion proposal for military and domestic programs for FY2022, an 8.6% increase from the $1.4 trillion enacted for FY2021, excluding emergency measures for the pandemic. The proposed budget provides increases to most civilian science agencies, but cuts military basic research by 11% to $2.3 billion and its applied science budget falls by 16% to 5.6%. Assuming inflation is about 4% in FY2022, the Department of Defense’s FY2022 would receive about $112 billion for research, development, test and engineering (RDT&E), about 0.6% more than that for FY2021. For non-defense agencies, federal spending on basic research would rise by 10% or $4.4 billion to $47.4 billion. Non-defense applied research would get a 14% increase or $6.3 billion to $51.1 billion. Specifically, the President’s agency budget proposals are as follows. These proposals will be debated in congress over the next four months and will likely change before the final appropriation bills are sent to the President for approval for FY2022, which begins on October 1, 2021.
Agency FY2022 FY2022 R&D budget
NIH + 21% $ 52 billion with $6.5 billion to ARPA-H
NSF + 20% $ 10.2 billion with $865 million to Tech, Innovation & Partnerships
DOE + 5.3% $ 7.4 billion with $828 million to biological and environmental research
NASA + 6.6% $ 24.8 billion with $7.9 billion for science (+8.6%)
CDC + 22% $ 9.5 billion with $400 million for public health infrastructure
USDA + 24% $ 1.85 billion with $92 million for climate science
EPA + 21.7% $ 11.2 billion with $60 million for climate change research
USGS + 25% $ 1.6 billion with $205 million for climate science
FDA + 8% $ 6.5 billion with $185 million to update aging infrastructure
R&D World’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in R&D. The top 25 industrial R&D spenders in 2019 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2020 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (10 companies), automotive (6 companies) and ICT (9 companies) who invested a cumulative total of nearly 260 billion dollars in R&D in 2019, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spent in the world by government, industries and academia combined, according to R&D World’s 2021 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D World Index are tabulated from NASDAQ. NYSE, and OTC common stock prices for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the online publication of the R&D World Index.
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