A recent study by The New England Journal of Medicine has shown that public research institutes have had increased contribution to drug discovery. Since the dawn of biotechnology, it has generally been the case that public research institutions perform the basic research necessary to understand disease mechanisms while corporate research has been focused on developing drugs to treat diseases. However, after two acts passed in the mid 1980s, federally funded institutions and laboratories were granted the possibility to both freely publish their inventions in the scientific literature and convert them into intellectual property for commercialization. With a decade of delay, this change was reflected in the percentage of FDA approved drugs originating in the public sector. Between 1981 and 1999, only 7.6% of the FDA approved biological molecules came from non-industry sources. Whereas, between 1998 and 2007, 24.1% of the FDA approved biological molecules came from public research institutions. Lastly, the study suggests that public sector research aims to discover drugs that are expected to have a large clinical impact.
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