TY - JOUR
T1 - Expanding roles for academic entrepreneurship in drug discovery
AU - Kinch, Michael S.
AU - Horn, Caitlin
AU - Kraft, Zachary
AU - Schwartz, Tyler
N1 - Funding Information:
Returning to our original motivation to assess the role of public sector funding upon drug development, the final set of studies asked whether academic inventors or founders had received NIH funding before their entrepreneurial contributions ( Fig. 3 ). This question was addressed by determining whether the academic inventors and founders had received an NIH grant based upon information provided by the NIH Reporter website. Importantly, the topic of the grant directly related to the final drug product. This approach revealed that 28 of the 32 academic inventors of an FDA-approved drug had received at least one NIH grant (the others worked outside of the USA and did not qualify for NIH support). Likewise, companies founded by NIH-funded academics contributed an additional 46 NMEs. This fact is consistent both with the concepts advanced by Marianna Mazzucato of the NIH as ‘public venture capital’ and with Holden Thorp’s thesis that academics increasingly serve as the ‘Engines of Innovation’ for the American economy [11,12] . Consequently, the overall number of NIH-funded medicines encompasses 74 of 383 NMEs; or nearly one in five evaluable new drugs approved from 2001 through 2019. This rate has steadily increased over time and now stands at ten NMEs per year (nearly one-third of all new medicines).
Funding Information:
This work was supported by a generous gift from Washington University in St Louis and the Mark Cuban Foundation . We also thank Mark Cuban and Eric Pachman at 46Brooklyn for insightful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - An assessment of inventors of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medicines reveals a growing role for academic entrepreneurship in general and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported investigators in particular. For all small-molecule therapeutics approved between 2001 and 2019 (383 in total), 8.3% listed an academic inventor in the Orange Book. Remarkably, an additional 23.8% listed an inventor from a company founded by an NIH-funded academic inventor. Over time, the relative inventive contributions from academia has progressively increased, including nearly one-third of medicines approved since 2017. These findings suggest a surging role for academic inventors and founders, perhaps in combination with a faltering of traditional private sector dominance of drug discovery.
AB - An assessment of inventors of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medicines reveals a growing role for academic entrepreneurship in general and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported investigators in particular. For all small-molecule therapeutics approved between 2001 and 2019 (383 in total), 8.3% listed an academic inventor in the Orange Book. Remarkably, an additional 23.8% listed an inventor from a company founded by an NIH-funded academic inventor. Over time, the relative inventive contributions from academia has progressively increased, including nearly one-third of medicines approved since 2017. These findings suggest a surging role for academic inventors and founders, perhaps in combination with a faltering of traditional private sector dominance of drug discovery.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85090846184&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.drudis.2020.09.004
DO - 10.1016/j.drudis.2020.09.004
M3 - Short survey
C2 - 32920058
AN - SCOPUS:85090846184
SN - 1359-6446
VL - 25
SP - 1905
EP - 1909
JO - Drug Discovery Today
JF - Drug Discovery Today
IS - 11
ER -