PDB ROI 800x — $5.5B economic impact / $6.1M federal funding/yr

The Protein Data Bank, operating on approximately $6.1 million/year in federal funding, generates an estimated $5.5 billion in annual economic impact — an 800:1 return (S-0109).

The figure is the documented outlier in the ROI range. The reason for the outlier status is the open-data multiplier C-0032 documents: PDB structural data feeds the entire pharmaceutical R&D pipeline, with 88% of new drug approvals 2010-2016 (S-0013a) and 100% of new cancer drugs 2019-2023 (S-0081, E-0050) drawing on PDB data.

The 800:1 return is not generalizable to all research data infrastructure — most data does not have pharmaceutical R&D as a downstream economic vector. But it does establish the ceiling of what well-curated, openly-accessible research data infrastructure can deliver, and it establishes that the documented ROI range (5:1-26:1 for the cluster, 800:1 for the outlier) brackets a wide envelope within which any specific Tier 3 deployment will fall.