Variables collected included the study title, abstract, funding awarded to the study, lead institution, principal inverstigator, and the year of award. We included all immunology and vaccine-related studies for infectious diseases where the lead institution was based in the UK. We excluded immunology and Vaccine studies not immediately relevant to infectious diseases. Veterinary infectious disease research was excluded unless there was a clear zoonotic component. We excluded open-access data from the pharmaceutical data from the pharmaceutical industry, due to paucity of publically available data. All grant funding amounts were adjusted for inflation and reported in 2010 UK pounds. Grants were not modified according to levels of overheads applied to the award. Grants awarded in a currency other than pounds were converted to UK pounds using the mean exchange rate in the year of award.
A team of researchers and the authors sourced data for the study over 3 year.
Data were categorised between December 2010 and April 2012 and analysed in two steps: between October 2011 and May 2012, and in july 2013. Microsoft Excel software was used for data categorisation. We used fold differences and statistical tests to compare total investment, number of studies, mean grant, and median grant according to specific infection, disease system, funding organization, and cross-cutting categories. Statistical analysis and generation of figures and graphs were performed using stata software