Drugs are rarely (if ever?) developed by academics, and cost a huge amount. Low estimates for bringing a new drug to market are around $500M+:

They found that companies took an average of 7.3 years to win FDA approval, at a median cost of $648 million. Only two drugs had research costs over $1 billion. Adding in the cost of capital at 7 percent increased the median research and development cost to $757 million—less than a third of the Tufts estimate.[1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/drug-pric...