I am familiar with the history. The problematic gaps in medical research are well-known even within the government communities with budget for biomedical research. Ironically, the US military has ended up funding, despite their more limited budget and no real mandate, basic medical research into common non-military diseases like multiple sclerosis that NIH/NSF ignore but have obvious ROI for reducing population-scale medical costs (which affects the military but is outside the scope of its mission). Similarly, the rise of privately funded foundations to fill persistent odd gaps in government-funded biomedical research are well-documented.

The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.

I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.