Developing new drugs
The process of developing new drugs is a long, expensive and highly specialised.
Although you’ll have heard of the big names in the industry in fact it’s littered with a host of fairly small but highly specialised companies who take on specific aspects of the process. These range from the likes of ideas houses which examine research, usually in a very small niche area, to find new ways that attacks on particular diseases might be launched though the use of designed drugs (ie by examining how the disease actually operates and designing something to stop it) through to clinical laboratory services which aim to get a new drug through all the increasingly complex regulatory hoops that you find these days (and, of course, each country has different rules).
Even the major players use a number of these specialised outfits these days so by the time a new medicine has arrived on the shelves there may have been dozens of separate companies involved in its development.
And you just thought that the new headache tablet seemed a bit expensive 
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