No drug company, no matter how large, can afford to spend a billion dollars and 19 years getting a non-patentable treatment through the bureaucratic minefield

Interestingly, there are organisations which *can* afford that kind of money and do this kind of thing.

I read a book over Xmas about various Great British contributions to science and engineering. One of those was the Human Genome Project. Turns out that when Craig Ventner's crew were going to do it and patent the whole lot, the Wellcome Foundation injected a whole lot of money into the free alternative project and embarrassed the US government into putting up more to match it. The Wellcome Foundation has a truly amazing amount of money and has no requirement for the results to make a profit for anyone. If they think it's worthwhile, they can throw government-level amounts of money (or more) at a problem.

For an example of a more recent creation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is starting to do a similar job on third-world diseases.

The problem is that the number of such organisations is limited, and so are their budgets. Still, it does mean that if there's a really promising idea which is only stopped by lack of funding by companies, there are other alternatives if the people involved have the wit to go looking.

Graham.