How much does NIH spend researching major diseases?
NIH put $7.0 billion into cancer research in fiscal 2025, more than any other major disease, followed by HIV/AIDS ($4.0 billion) and Alzheimer's and related dementias ($3.0 billion); opioid research got $825 million. The categories are NIH's own (RCDC), and a project that studies two diseases counts in both. These are totals of the projects listed in RePORTER, so they differ somewhat from NIH's published category estimates.
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Source and date
- Source
- NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC)
- Data as of
- Published
The data
| Disease (NIH spending category) | NIH funding (dollars) |
|---|---|
| Cancer | 6,971,923,613 |
| HIV/AIDS | 3,952,073,353 |
| Alzheimer's and related dementias | 2,991,568,139 |
| Heart disease | 1,695,040,418 |
| Obesity | 1,086,443,218 |
| Diabetes | 1,011,114,540 |
| Opioids | 824,934,646 |
| Breast cancer | 691,680,360 |
| Depression | 665,483,530 |
| Tuberculosis | 561,007,295 |
| Stroke | 413,805,063 |
| Lung cancer | 384,789,881 |
| Autism | 323,222,681 |
| Parkinson's disease | 234,449,748 |
| Malaria | 208,907,222 |