The oft-cited $2.6B cost to develop a drug from the tufts studies pertains to r&d costs up to FDA approval. You need FDA approval to market a drug and the tufts

The oft-cited $2.6B cost to develop a drug from the tufts studies pertains to r&d costs up to FDA approval. You need FDA approval to market a drug and the tufts studies don't include any pre-approval market research costs from what I can tell However a big part of the $2.6B is the money invested into drugs that don't end up getting approved, ie cost of failure. The actual cash cost of getting a drug approved is probably an order of magnitude less Once approved most drugs do 90%+ gross margins so are quite profitable