It's my understanding that new drug development, ...

[SHRED]

...medical equipment, and treatment techniques are developed to a large extent by public money via grants and seed money to Universities.
Of course the profits from those publicly funded developments are realized by corporate interests (more corporate welfare).

Private health insurance benefits greatly from Medicaid and Medicare as places where high risk (least profitable) people get covered thus eliminating huge risk pools for the private sector special interests.

"Free Market"?

Yeah right.


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[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. You're catching on.

;)

[HillbillyBob]

2. Bingo.

nt

[sharp_stick]

3. Not the whole story

Universities provide a lot of basic research, but I don't think drug development is part of their mission. Some Universities, or more specifically individual labs or research groups in these Universities work on exploratory studies finding and base testing drug targets, usually following up an interesting find in some basic research proposal.

Other, often publically funded, research focuses on conditions that drug companies don't because of poor return on investment such as rare conditions. This can pay off handsomely for the lab, research group and University if it works. The reason this is publically funded is because the chances of it working to produce a real drug are very slim but the research can go a long way to helping us understand the condition, genetics and biology as a society.

When I was in grad school we were part of the development of a new meningitis vaccine. Our research group along with the University sold the rights to a pharma company and I don't think my former supervisor or a lot of the other researchers in that group will need to compete for public funds via grants for a long long time. Some of the royalties go directly back to the University. A good part of the later research was funded with a collaboration with the pharma company over the last two years of my time in the lab as well, no NIH funding on that project.

I know of no Universities that actually do efficacy testing, toxicology testing, ADME testing, enantiomer and salt form analysis in the Discovery stage of drug production. When a drug actually gets into development I don't think any University does any of the long term tox testing, clinical testing or production of documents for the FDA and other regulatory agencies.

Discovering a target and compound to work on that target is an important first step but the hard work is just beginning at that point.