True. Basic research can takes years to yield anything useful. However, basic research is also relatively low cost compared to the cost of say, running a clinical trial.
A single phase 3 clinical trial can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. You can fund a lot of basic research for that kind of money.
When I was in grad school, my PI got grants of ~$2M a year and that supported a lab of ~10 researchers.
> When I was in grad school, my PI got grants of ~$2M a year and that supported a lab of ~10 researchers.
There's a big pay difference between grad students, industry researchers, and government researchers, with grad students being the lowest on the totem pole. Which should make sense because they are researchers in training. There's many different types of research too.
That's true, but even if you quadrupled the costs to account for market rate salaries, you're still two orders of magnitude smaller than typical development costs.
I'm not saying Phase III is really expensive, it is. But you're also ignoring the failure rates of Phase I and Phase II. If you only count the success rate of Phase I's that make it to Phase III and beyond then you're ignoring >80% of the basic research cost.
A single phase 3 clinical trial can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. You can fund a lot of basic research for that kind of money.
When I was in grad school, my PI got grants of ~$2M a year and that supported a lab of ~10 researchers.