I worked for 'a medium-sized pharma based in the south east'. Whilst there are many conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical industry, they're generally tosh, except one. This is, that many pharmaceuticals look for breakthrough drugs in areas of both high demand, and high potential payments.
What most people fail to realise is what might be called the rule of 20: Only 1 in 20 all highly developed pharmaceuticals make it to market (and this excludes those that fail much earlier in the process); that you only have 20 years of patent to make money, and that it takes say 20 years to get to market (example, the new wonder drug for prostate cancer took two Israeli scientists 15 years to develop, before another few years of testing in hospitals around the world - actually it was so good they stopped the trials early).
An additional point is that most pharmaceutical companies only have one, maybe two, real money spinners, and most of the rest make reasonable, not huge profits. When you then consider that most of these profits then are used to pay for R&D of new drugs, most of whom will never see the light of day, and the pressure to supply certain drugs for reduced prices, plus incredible insurance costs (Thalidomide especially causing this), then, whilst drug companies can make huge profits, it's a very risky business. It's like gambling, with huge stakes.
Sure, kick the pharmaceuticals. They do over-price in America, and have taken advantage of the NHS's pricing strategy (but to be fair, in both instances, they took advantage of crap systems), but they're a lot more cut-throat than one might imagine (of course my company always priced fairly...
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In the company I was in, our new wonder drug failed to get clinical acceptance in all countries. This caused a massive problem. Whole budgets were based on this new wonder drug getting accepted, as the extant drugs, which had been powering the company, one in particular, was coming to an end of the patent, and the likes of Teva would make a generic version of it (probably in a UK plant), in fact, IIRC, we knew they were.
