That's true, but what's happening now is that startups are licensing tech from academia, making it closer to "industrial grade" in terms of scale and quality, p

That's true, but what's happening now is that startups are licensing tech from academia, making it closer to "industrial grade" in terms of scale and quality, proving the concept more definitively (usually in humans) then selling to big pharma. Big pharma does license stuff from academia all the time, but for orders of magnitude less money than what they pay for startups with good research