Possible explanations for the rise up to 2006 followed by an eight-year decline are discussed in PMID 24204758 as well as the accompanying 'In the Pipeline' commentary. However, while it is not clear exactly what factors contributed to the 2017/18 uptick, this appears to have recovered to the 2006 peak levels. It should be noted that university or institute does not provide a clean discrimination between commercial and academic drug discovery. Nonetheless, the divergence is clearly increasing because the academic (orange line) has flatlined while the commercial sector has been accelerating. There is perhaps a slight indication of an academic uptick over the last two years but note these plots have a lag time of at least 18 months extending to several years (i.e. we might speculate an increase in ADEV patenting over the last few years would not yet have come through). The breakdown of top patent applicants is shown in Fig. . As expected, applicants in medicinal chemistry are historically dominated by large pharma companies (n.b. the Glaxo matches are pre-GSK filings), but with the perhaps unexpected inclusion of the Regents of the University of California in 5 th place. This puts them at the top of the right-hand panel that is led by US universities but note the Chinese academy in 9 th position. However, inspection of the patents on the right show that many are focused more on biotech-type claims rather than medicinal chemistry composition-of-matter on the left (i.e. they tend more towards A61 than C07)