zlacker

>>modele+(OP)
There is a lot in here but turning a non-profit into a for-profit definitely should be challenged. Otherwise why wouldn't everyone start as a non-profit, develop your IP, and then switch to 'for-profit' mode once you got something that works? You don't pay income taxes and your investors get write offs.

>>silico+z11
Isn't this how drugs get developed? Even worse, the research is done using public funds, and then privatized and commercialized later.

>>jjjjj5+041
This is a huge problem in the US. Tax-payers are subsidizing a lot of medical advances, then the US government gives it to the private sector, privatizing whatever medical advances were paid by tax-dollars.

Socialism seems to create a lot of markets for the Capitalist private sector.

>>pleasa+451
Do the private companies get some special IP rights on the public sector research? It seems like in a competitive market, those private companies would have thin margins. What stops a lower cost competitor from using the same public IP? I’m clearly missing something important here.

>>liamco+f81
I suspect that's due to the misleading nature of the 'public research, privitized profits' trope. The reality is that publically-funded biomedical (for the lack of better word) science does not generate anything production-ready.

Academia produces tens of thousands of papers per year; many of these are garbage, p-hacking or low value - the rest are often contradictory, misleading, hard to interpret or just report a giant body of raw-ish data. It is a very valuable process - despite all the waste - but the result of this is too raw to be actionable.

This body of raw 'science' is the necessary substrate for biotechnology and drug development - it needs to be understood, processed, and conceptualised into a hypothesis (which most likely fail) strong enough to invest billions of dollars into.

Pharmaceutical industry is the market-based approach to prioritising investment into drug development (what is it, 100B$ p/y?) - and even a leftist who might want to debate in favour of a different economic model would have to agree that this job is hard, important, and needs to be done.