All the preclinical work is actually the cheap part of pharmaceutical development. Most of the costs come from the clinical trials for the FDA. Now a lot of the reason for this is that the US spends a pretty penny (and a lot of elbow grease from grad students) on basic biomedical research that's published into journals for "free" from the perspective of the pharmaceutical corporation.
That said, if you can make clinical trial reporting data collection more efficient, there's a LOT of money to be made.
it is a half baked truth. pharma want you to believe trials are expensive so they inflate crazily their costs to price their drugs high. but at the end when u try to sell them software they dont look at the inflates costs of trials be sure of that
Costs don't drive prices. Demand does. I'll be the first to admit that pharmaceutical economics is not simple (lots of externalities, asymmetry of information, etc.), but in the long run costs do matter, and so does price. Best example is Solvaldi, which initially sold for ~$100,000 per treatment. It's much much down (~$65,000) once Merk came online with their hep C competitor. Prices do matter, and while the market is easily distorted, it's not immune to the laws of economics.
That said, if you can make clinical trial reporting data collection more efficient, there's a LOT of money to be made.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3078