“…Given these potential contributors to decision-making about funding allocation, perfect alignment with DALYs or any other measure of disease burden would not be expected. However, faced with competing priorities for scarce resources on health research, DALYs, a comprehensive health measure that reflects the aging of the population and public health needs, should be considered as an important benchmark in assuming research priorities for funding decisions [2,3,5,[46][47][48][49][50]. For instance, after a long discussion on what indicators to consider in the US https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228542.g002 [44,51,52], which is the largest investor in health R&D in the world [11]; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) noted in its recent strategic plan that DALYs would serve as a crucial consideration in aligning NIH's research priorities with public health needs [53].…”