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Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will invest more in products that can generate a sufficient return.

The pharma industry is one of the few industries that comes up every year and brags about how much worse they got - like, now it costs $2 billion to make a drug, and it was a billion 5 years ago.

As of 2011, it cost about $5,000 to launch a tech startup.

Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin - around $8,800 a month - may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs.

The cost of research, development and testing of a new drug is vastly greater than the cost of each dose produced. How should we pay for new medicines? Innovators should be rewarded according to the impact of their medicine, and people should contribute to these rewards according to their ability to pay.

In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.

Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.

Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.

Cadila, India's sixth-largest drugmaker by sales, spent $250 million developing Lipaglyn, a new chemical entity or new discovery, and aims to spend another $150 million to $200 million to launch the drug outside India.

First of all, pharmaceutical costs are the single fastest-growing part of our health care budget.