Or the pharma industry has become like Hollywood where it prefers to rehash a known drug, get a new patent on it, and make a few extra billion dollars for relatively low cost, instead of trying to innovate and "risk" more money in multiple projects that may or may not succeed.
It behaves in perfectly rational and understandable ways that correspond directly with the way it's incentivized. Developing new drugs is expensive, getting them approved is more expensive, and there's no guarantee it will work or be approved.
As a corporate entity, drug companies are capable of deploying investors' capital in a variety of ways. If they neglected the ways that actually made money, they would be short on investors pretty quickly.
