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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

I’m very open to being wrong here, but for the specific example of CAR-T, Wikipedia mentions that it was initially developed by researchers at a university in Israel. So not the pharmaceutical industry.

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UPenn and Novartis brought Kymriah to market and Kite brought Yescarta to market. Universities can be great for discovery and sponsored research, but they are not leading the work needed to get to market and they are certainly not funding it. Universities efforts are the visible tip of the iceberg, pharma efforts are the bulk under the surface.

Thanks for the info. My comment was mostly coming from a place of having read articles like this about how antibiotics don’t really make money for pharmaceutics companies:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/02/antibiotics-ar...

I see where you're coming from now. ABX (antibiotics) are a bit unique. New ABX are sparingly profitable because they are usually incremental developments instead of new classes of compounds. A new class would be lucrative. I see this as a reflection that ABX dev is a ridiculously hard problem with many failures. There are many working in this area, but not much to show yet.

Although Novartis and Kite brought them to market, aren't - from what I've read in several papers (correct me if I'm mistaken) - the vast majority of clinical trials in this area still publicly funded? (NIH/NCI grants)

Public funds are used up to proof of concept and sometimes early tox/CMC (often through a CRO), but the bulk of the funding for trials comes from industry.

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