Recherche alcoologique française. La contribution du financement par l’industrie des boissons alcoolisées

The budget devoted to alcohol research in France is a matter of debate. Insufficient (regarding the major public health problem) and irregular when it is given by public authorities, it is frequently unrecognized when it comes from the private domain, and especially from alcohol producers. We therefore propose a description of the research funding coming from private industry in France, on the basis of the activity of the Institut de recherches scientifiques sur les boissons (Ireb) from 2001 to 2011. We were able to estimate such support, thanks to a survey made by the Fondation pour la recherche en alcoologie (FRA) in 2015, and a bibliometry study. The declared budget for alcohol research of the 19 teams that replied to the FRA survey amounted to 1,250 k€€(average for 2014 and 2015), which allowed an estimate of global annual budget of 4 M€ for the 42 laboratories implicated in alcohol research in France. As a comparison, the annual budget of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in US is 430 M€, which corresponds to a 23 times larger support per capita. Also in UK, with an annual budget of 16 M€, the support per capita is four times larger than in France. The bibliometry analysis of Bramness et al. (2014) showed that France had a weak level of publications dedicated to alcohol research in comparison with US and most other European countries. Out of the 517 publications on alcohol from French research groups between 2001 and 2011, 84 (16.3%) acknowledged Ireb, which corresponded to an average of eight publications supported by Ireb per year. With a yearly support averaging 200 k€, Ireb contribution actually represents only 5% of the total budget devoted to alcohol research in France. Although these data are only indicative of the present situation, they both show that the relative weight of private support to alcohol research is weak, and put further emphasis on the acute need of greater support of this research domain by public authorities in our country.