It doesn’t (have to) cost billions to bring a (successful) drug to market.

And if you pick a single successful example that was discovered in academia, was spun out into a small focussed biotech, and was in a disease area that didn’t require large or multiple studies to make it to market, you’ll have your anecdote to prove your point.

Except… you’d be ignoring the costs of the 90% of drugs that fail in phase 1. You’d be ignoring the huge amount spent on discovery across the industry that never leads to a successful candidate.

Drug discovery and development is difficult because, for all of our clever science, it’s still essentially serendipitous and random. And we’ve not yet figured out how to make a production line out of something that’s random, try as we might. And it’s expensive because of the failures as well as the cost associated with success.