There is no claim that each drug costs 1$ billion. If you stop after 1-2 years of development you might have wasted some millions, if you stop after 3-4 years you wasted tens of millions and so on. The 10% success is still very low, because you can still fail after 10 years (potentially investing a lot)
If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."
There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.
If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."
There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.