>FWIW, the average cost to develop a new drug actually is well over a billion dollars, meaning that a lot more units would have to be sold and/or the price set a lot higher for the effort to be worth it. The interest alone on this sort of expense would be well into the hundreds of millions of $ and growing at $140M annually before the first dose is sold. If the company sells 1M units annually they'd need to charge $150 just to cover the interest and around $500 per unit to reduce the deficit in a reasonable period. Any less and they would have been better off to put their billion dollars in the bank and develop nothing.
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>I agree with you that it is easy to look at that $500 price and scream about the apparent 4900% profit, but that's what is needed to make it worthwhile.

I agree that it's easy to invent a set of numbers and be amazed at the results. Even if we pulled real numbers, I doubt it will ever be clear how do they break even at all.

I also doubt that the so-called cost of development is real; looks like creative accounting to me, and also a way to scare competition into giving up on new development. A smaller laboratory may be able to hit the right combination, even to find volunteers for testing, but it can't possibly afford to get into the big playpen where the big guys do their expensive testing. The little guys can only be happy that they may be bought before they vanish.