Academic researchers shaped the landscape of drug discovery for nearly two centuries, and their efforts initiated programs for more than half of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved new molecular entities (NMEs). During the first 50 years of the 20th century, contributions from industry-based discovery programs steadily increased, stabilizing near half of all first publications for NMEs. Although academia and industry have made similar contributions to the discovery of FDA-approved NMEs, there remains a substantial difference in the gap-to-approval; on average, industry NMEs are 12 years closer to market at the time of the first publication. As more drug discovery efforts shift from industry to academia, including high-throughput screening resources, academia could have an increasingly crucial role in drug discovery.
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