Re:Simple solution ... (Score 1)

Getting a drug to market (and into the hands of the doctors and patients) is about more than research. It's about time and money: TIME: 8 - 10 YEARS!! MONEY: > $500 MILLION. For one drug.

It involves years of clinical trials, and wading through the FDA (and other governments' regs and requirements) to "prove" safety and efficacy. While the research can, indeed, be done in the university labs, in the interest of "pure science", to get a compound from the discovery stage ("Hey, look what this does") to the product stage ("Take two and call me tomorrow") is a huge, expensive undertaking. At this point, the only entities that have the resources to pursue such a course are either governments or big pharmaceutical companies. Governments aren't interested in making products; and research monies are drying up - it's become extremely difficult to get research grants funded; university researchers I know have reported that only one in five or one in eight of their proposals get funded.

The logic is that without the exclusivity afforded by a patent (or some such protection) no one could be convinced to invest 100's of millions of dollars to bring a drug candidate to market.

Maybe flame bait, but that's what it is: development is expensive, way more so than the research that found the compound.