Public research grants are mostly for super early stage pre-clinical stuff which isn’t really the expensive part of drug development. The expensive bit is testing it in humans.
Novo Nordisk has been the one funding GLP-1 research since the 1990s. It got started manufacturing insulin in the 1920s so that kind of research was right up its alley. It’s controlled by a charitable foundation too.
Sadly they’ve got a strong claim to being the ones responsible for the basic research here, which is exceedingly rare in pharma. Their latest drugs like Ozempic are the result of decades long research.