zlacker

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+(OP)
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.