Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commer

Publicly funded research typically focuses on curiosity driven, high-risk, long-term research that doesn't have very good odds of ever producing a viable commercial product. Private enterprise focuses on short-term, low-risk research and engineering, packaging, marketing, etc. to bring safe-bets to market. For every big-pharma dollar spent to produce a new drug, ten government dollars were probably spent to get the underlying science to the point where pharmacorps were willing to touch it, and a hundred dollars more of government funding probably went off on various other tangents that turned out to be dead-ends. On the other hand, academics often suck at commercializing their research. Bringing a drug to market involves many years of careful study and clinical trials that are utterly boring to most researchers in academia. You can't get journal publications out of your twentieth double-blind study looking for side-effects! Big pharma companies do perform a valuable service, but the rewards they receive are out of proportion. Multiple decades of monopoly are an unreasonable reward for performing this last step in development, especially when a lot of drug patents are the result of meaningless changes to existing products that are made solely to restart the monopoly clock! Taking academic research and turning it into a commercial product does take time and money, and without patents this crucial last-step might not be adequately incentivised. However, If corporations want exclusive rights to commercialize publicly funded research, perhaps the public deserves a cut. Perhaps Pfizer, etc. should be on the hook to help fund some of the taxpayer funded research they benefit from. Either that, or some alternative way to fund commercialization of academic research needs to be found.