[lastpingstandin]

I seem to recall that the reason marketing costs seem high relative to R&D is that large firms typically acquire much smaller firms, small firms which invested a ton of money developing a drug but without the means of distributing it.

When a company like Pfizer acquires said company, none of the R&D spending of the smaller company gets absorbed into Pfizer's balance sheet.

In 2006, the pharma entire industry spend 12 billion in marketing, but 58.8 billion on r&d. Simply looking at individual large companies' doesn't do this justice.

http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/marketin...