> It's just funding.

And to have funding, you have to attract investors. How to attract investors? By making it quite profitable to invest in the company, i.e. making it profitable for the shareholders.

With enough money, you can do anything big pharma is doing. But how to get that money consistently is another question that have an uncomfortable answer. Plenty of startup and small biotech companies go bankrupt every year. This isn't something you can do in a garage and turn it into a multibillion dollar business like software. Biopharma has too many regulations and rules to follow and it makes the entire field incredibly risky and less likely for a small and unattractive player to succeed, even if they are driven by passion.