alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
The best part for NU is they didn’t even have to pay for the research, it was publicly funded:
> Pregabalin was discovered largely on the basis of publicly funded research at Northwestern University
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34493615/