An assessment of inventors of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medicines reveals a growing role for academic entrepreneurship in general and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported investigators in particular. For all small-molecule therapeutics approved between 2001 and 2019 (383 in total), 8.3% listed an academic inventor in the Orange Book. Remarkably, an additional 23.8% listed an inventor from a company founded by an NIH-funded academic inventor. Over time, the relative inventive contributions from academia has progressively increased, including nearly one-third of medicines approved since 2017. These findings suggest a surging role for academic inventors and founders, perhaps in combination with a faltering of traditional private sector dominance of drug discovery.

对美国食品和药物管理局 (FDA) 批准的药物发明者的评估显示，学术创业精神在总体上发挥着越来越大的作用，特别是美国国立卫生研究院 (NIH) 支持的研究人员。在 2001 年至 2019 年间批准的所有小分子疗法（总共 383 种）中，8.3% 在橙皮书中列出了学术发明人。值得注意的是，另外 23.8% 列出的发明人来自由 NIH 资助的学术发明人创办的公司。随着时间的推移，学术界的相对发明贡献逐渐增加，包括自 2017 年以来批准的近三分之一的药物。这些发现表明，学术发明者和创始人的作用日益增强，这或许与传统私营部门在药物发现方面的主导地位摇摇欲坠相结合。 。