Developing the actual therapeutic is a very different endeavor, not one that academic institutions are well set up for. You need to do pre-clinical studies on efficacy and toxicity, modify your drug to make sure your animal models work, then scale that to humans including engineering the right delivery format, dosage, etc. that process for the most part is inefficient, expensive, and has a high rate of failure.

> which is an altogether more effective way of developing new medicines anyway

I would like to believe that, but have you got any data to back this point? How many new medicines are developed by public research?

See the downvoted answer below for citations.

Nonsense, disregarding the pink elephant in the room (reproducibility in academia) once a method has shown potential it is often spun off into some sort startup (often SBR recipients). If they keep gaining clout, a bigger pharmaceutical will buy them out. New medicines are developed 10% by a university and 90% by industry.

And the university likely pockets a nice little "non-profit"

Not 90%. 58%. According to JAMA.

https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=185198

When the public funds drug research it also doesn't "magically" discover that its drugs are really effective when they aren't:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2006/06/1...

Actually when the public funds drug research it's often not reproducible 1. From personal experience the number of times when the work isn't a fabrication is less than the number of fingers on my right hand.

1 http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/04/the-need-for-reprodu...

You're seriously going to post Mercola on HN?

Yes, go ahead and down vote me for flagging links to a quack's website.

Please don't post comments about getting downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The comment was unsubstantive and dismissive. If there's something wrong with a source, it would be better to explain what that is instead of just snarking, which (a) undermines civility and (b) teaches us nothing.

Very well. Joseph Mercola[1] to put it politely, is not burdened by objective reproduction of claimed results when hawking his alternative remedies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola

If you're going to disagree with the source, disagree with the source, not the website that cited the source:

"Researchers from the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City examined four journals: American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. They found drugs were favored in roughly:"

Is Beth Israel full of quacks?

I doubt it, but since Mercola didn't link me to their meta-study I can't find the reference directly. It's not the JAMA link that was in the OP.