[request_id]

Off top of head, the recent Ebola vaccine was created almost exclusively from gov. research. Merck bought a company who was supposed to commercialize it but they did a really poor job . There are people who would not be dead if the vaccine had been available, sooner

[natechols]

That's an anecdote, not data. The last article I read about this calculated that around 20% of new drug approvals came directly from government/academic research - and that's usually repurposed older drugs (which is actually a good place to focus, since it's cheaper and big pharma isn't really interested in resurrecting off-patent molecules).