Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
Penicillin?

But no, Universities tend not to make products ready for sale - they just do all the research needed.

I can't really see why Oxford, Cambridge or whatever should be unable to produce a medicine.
We rarely, if ever use penicillin as is created by the mould, as the spectrum of activity is very low and it has to be given intravenously. I think "developed" is a rather flattering term for "accidentally found after poor sterile technique on a petri dish".

Universities do set up spin off biotechs which again tend to do the pre-clinical work by themselves and then team up with a large(r) company to do Phase I-III trials / license and market the product.

Universities don't have the hundreds of millions / billions to spare to get one registered - odds of a molecule getting between phase I and the market are something like 1 in 100. Big (bad, eeeeeevil) companies get money on the ones they sell to invest in R&D which more often than not goes nowhere.

Then even when registered, most healthcare professionals demand vastly more trial data than purely to register a product - and guess what? That costs further millions now which might be paid back later.