This is an important point. There's nothing to stop Harvard or Stanford from commercializing their research directly. They have massive endowments of financial and human capital.
The flip critique of the drug industry is to suggest they're basically taking miracle cures developed in toto in publicly-funded labs and taking pure profits.
If that were the case, shouldn't one of the dozens of well-capitalized research institutions just go to market?
The reality is the drug companies take on a tremendous burden turning high-level research into a product that works, including:
+ Formulating a product that will work at scale,
+ In widely diverse populations,
+ While eliminating potential side effects,
+ Adapting for human UX limitations,
+ Exhaustively guarding against adverse reactions,
+ At the same time, building production capacity,
+ Creates marketing materials for patients, but also to educate doctors who don't have scads of time to study new treatments,
+ Physically distributing the product
+ Monitoring the product fastidiously once it's on the market for negative reactions,
+ Sending humans to almost every doctor's office to answer any questions about the product,
+ While staffing a 24/7 customer service number to sort out any problems
It's not as easy as it's made out to be!
