@xtaldave Yes, I'm asking precisely to get to know who was able to do it and how that's possible.
For what I can see public research is mainly focused on developing methodologies or drugs and then sell them to industry as quickly as possible as it's almost impossible to actually go through the trials for a normal research group.
I don't know, maybe some large research institution was able to receive enough funding to do that.

I believe this is a huge problem, I have the feeling that if governments were to fully develop drugs and then release them without any patent that would make drugs much cheaper.
Indeed, this complicates a lot the academic process and brings some failure risks onto the governments, but probably they'll save much more from the availability of cheaper drugs.

I'll try to look around and see what I can find; alternatively I may decide to compile such a list myself as I believe that could be very useful, I don't think that would be a long list anyways.