We are not being paid to develop drugs. We are being paid to develop new knowledge that hopefully can be useful

You know that the R in R&D stands for "research", right? 🤦

The R&D you are paying for is for us to typically find out that “Protein X interacts with Protein Y and causes Effect Z. When we delete Protein X then Effect Z goes away”. We might also find out that “Molecule Q can block the activity of Protein X, but has a host of issues that make it ineffective when given to Petri dish cells and mice.”

Sounds a hell of a lot like that's the kind of research that's indispensable when formulating drugs.

This can give you a lead towards making a drug

Ya think? 🤦

but what we do is basically discover a possible starting point, nothing more

Sounds like you're doing all of the research and other legwork tbh. That's hardly just "a starting point".

I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from

You mean other than how you just confirmed it while trying to disprove it?

from my perspective within the system it’s not quite how things work.

That being the perspective of living proof that you can be intelligent and simultaneously oblivious of the obvious.

Either way, pharmaceutical companies aren't spending all their income on R&D. By far the biggest expense is advertising and after that, it's stockholder dividends of the absolutely obscene profits they're making on ripping off sick people.

It’s the same for engineering.

The government funds all those small pieces of knowledge through various grants. Some are private, but most are from the government.

Then someone will take those bits of knowledge and assemble them into a new drug. 90% of the boring research is already done.

My employer pays me and my team a lot of money to develop new engineering projects based on these academic papers. Everything is cited, and normally the grad students are ecstatic to be named as contributing work. Their names don’t show up on the design patent, but if someone digs into it they can see all the work that contributed.

You might not see it at your level, and I am truly sorry for that because you deserve credit for your work.

I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from.

It comes from reality

Onasemnogene abeparvovec, developed by the US biotechnology startup AveXis, which was acquired by Novartis in 2018, is based on research conducted at the Institut de Myologie in France.

The Institut de Myologie in France is a nonprofit org that funds itself mostly from a yearly telethon and government funding... This would be you

Novartis Gene Therapies, until 2020 known as AveXis, is a biotechnology company that develops treatments for rare neurological genetic disorders. It was founded in Dallas, Texas, United States in 2012 by John Carbona after reorganizing a company called BioLife Cell Bank founded by David Genecov and John Harkey. Work done at Nationwide Children's Hospital in the laboratory of Brian Kaspar was licensed to AveXis in October 2013. Unusual for the time, Nationwide Children's Hospital, in addition to upfront and milestone payments, also took an equity position in AveXis.

The Nationwide Children's Hospital is a nationally ranked pediatric acute care teaching hospital located in the Southern Orchards neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. The hospital has 673 pediatric beds and is affiliated with the Ohio State University College of Medicine

See? At least in part, the money for the start up that D the drug, based on the R France publicly provides, came from the Ohio State University which also receives public funding

As always with Capitalism... Socialise the costs, privatize the profits