At least in 2017-2018 (the only years I know the data offhand), I don't think any FDA approved drugs were developed by academia. It's hard to tell bc you can't

At least in 2017-2018 (the only years I know the data offhand), I don't think any FDA approved drugs were developed by academia. It's hard to tell bc you can't see all the licenses, but it's almost never the case that a drug comes straight from academia. Maybe an assay, or some interesting chemical matter, but almost never a drug Plus 30% or so of NIH money goes to universities for "overhead" and not to research The odds of a promising academic finding becoming a drug are incredibly low. and there is not enough NIH funding to support drug discovery and development I also think that if drug research was publicly funded t would be a nightmare. You'd probably end up with drugs costing more than they do now (in terms of added taxes you'd have to pay to bolster NIH budget) and getting fewer drugs approved. Pharma r&d is actually held to a much higher standard in terms of robustness than academic science. The incentives are just messed up in academia -- people want to publish first and foremost, not make medicines. And you can get crappy / irreproducble science published fairly readily One of the first things pharma companies do when considering licensing academic tech is try to replicate the findings independently. Often they can't At least in pharma, the incentives are to make drugs that get FDA approval, that docs prescribe to patients and that insurance companies pay for. For all that to happen the drugs have to work and work very well. And even with the profit motive as an incentive there is still poor decision making and incentive alignment