Kinch MS, Horn C, Kraft Z, Schwartz T. Expanding roles for academic entrepreneurship in drug discovery.
Drug Discov Today 2020;
25:S1359-6446(20)30342-1. [PMID:
32920058 PMCID:
PMC7484702 DOI:
10.1016/j.drudis.2020.09.004]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/16/2020] [Revised: 08/05/2020] [Accepted: 09/03/2020] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
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.
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