>> In early 2022 Krajmalnik-Brown and colleagues patented a specific bacterial formulation and spun-off a commercial company called Gut-Brain Axis Therapeutics.

I was a little surprised to see this.

So the university researchers use time and money from the university to make a discovery, extending on previous published research, and then patent it and start their own for-profit?

Excuse my ignorance, but is that how it's done generally? Where's the upside for all those who are potentially affected?

It kinda makes sense - Presumably the university is involved somewhere still, and it needs to be commercialised somehow, but..

Often universities do this, they may own the patent and license it to the company or take a cut etc. Arizona State University appear to do this through Skysong Innovations:

https://skysonginnovations.com/startups/list/

It's interesting they got a lot of funding from over 100 families with autism children:

https://skysonginnovations.com/startups/list/

This is how it works. Universities are doing research, they aren't doing products. If a commercially viable product comes out of their research it is far outside the scope of universities.

Also keep in mind that most sciences usually don't produce commercially viable research (think social sciences, archeology, geography etc.)

And as others said: how the universities gets a cut from the spin offs differs from university to university.

As others have said, very common. A famous example is Lyrica, which made an enormous amount of money for Northwestern, probably around $1 billion dollars. It played a not-insignificant role in the university's rise in the last 10-20 years.

Universities love this and encourage it. Any big place will have an office of "technology transfer" or similar to help researchers make this happen.

It's quite common historically. The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato looks at this phenomenon of companies privatizing the benefits of publicly funded research and, she argues, not giving enough in return

I think the university gets a cut. Kinda like how Gatorade is making I can’t remember which university incredible amounts of money for the last several decades.

> So the university researchers use time and money from the university

Don’t worry, the money is usually coming from taxpayers so the universities don’t have to dip into their endowments

> So the university researchers use time and money from the university to make a discovery, extending on previous published research, and then patent it and start their own for-profit?

it happens all the time, and in many countries. Its quite common in the UK.

Yes this is very common and a big part of why scientific progress often seems so hamstrung

Yes, it's really common. Most universities actually support this and there is a specific contractual framework for staff which basically says "If you create a company during or after your work at university which touches the field you were researching in, we get 1% (or 10% or 20%) of your annual revenue as license fees".

The alternatives are lengthy court battles between universities and their best (e.g. most commercial) researchers. This creates bad PR for the university and uncertainty for the researcher & their startups because potential investors don't like open court cases.

So people came around to make this kind of license fee contract and researchers check it before deciding to join a certain university.

Not a fan of gene / bacteria patents though.

Universities often keep up to 50% of rights over IP in such cases but I am unsure about this specific case.

Yes this is really common. Not all universities own the research you do. I have a similar setup within my university. They get to use the research technique I've worked on, but I have the rights to take it out of the university and sell it.