[pfisherman]

The government funds a lot of early stage preclinical research. These are the inexpensive stages of the pipeline.

As soon as you move into humans you can add another 2 or 3 zeros to your burn rate.

It is not politically feasible for the public sector to fund later stages. The numbers are just too big. Just think of the campaign ads that would run around $200M late stage failure funded by the government.

The reason why mega giant pharma companies exist is because they make enough money and are capitalized enough to withstand multiple $100M failures without going belly up.