Pharmaceutical companies are watching their R&D costs go up, up, up, as they search for the next blockbuster drug amid dried-up pipelines and upcoming patent cliffs, reports The Guardian's Julia Kollewe. A recent Deloitte report shows that the cost of bringing a drug to market for the world's 12 biggest pharma companies has risen by more than 25 percent to about $1 billion this year from about $830 million in 2010, Kollewe says.