Yes, but no university can afford to take the research results, make a cure from it and bring it to market. The regulatory overhead literally devours billions of dollars to get a new medicine approved.
And if a company can not expect to have some exclusive rights on that for at least a few years no one is going to spend that money. Competitors could just take your medicine, copy it and sell for lower because they had no upfront costs of getting it approved.
The economics behind pharmaceuticals are perverted - but at least they work.
Odds are the "make a cure from it" part would be a human invention and therefore patentable.
And even if all "cures" are no longer patentable - society wants cures to diseases. So if the system isn't delivering cures society will change the approval system[1]. It's not like the current approval process was handed down from god on stone tablets.
1) Or change patent law to cover discoveries from nature.
Odds are the "make a cure from it" part would be a human invention and therefore patentable.
That's a use patent and it's inferior to a composition patent.
Look at what's happening to Pfizer in the UK. They had a use patent on Lyrica, but no composition patent on it. That means anyone is free to make the drug. You can't really stop a doctor from using a drug for a certain disease if it's freely available.
Here we're not talking about medicines with ruinously expensive approval processes, though; we're talking about gene-based diagnostic tests. Non-invasive diagnostic tests don't have anything like the same kinds of regulatory hassles, because there isn't a question of side-effects - it's purely a question of how accurate they are.
And if a company can not expect to have some exclusive rights on that for at least a few years no one is going to spend that money. Competitors could just take your medicine, copy it and sell for lower because they had no upfront costs of getting it approved.
The economics behind pharmaceuticals are perverted - but at least they work.