The "cheese from yeast" example the article is taking about represents cell based experiments. The discoveries will be more like 3d printing with DNA. Structures, food and clothing made by microbes. The existing companies are good at drugs and will not likely be replaced by this.

A five armed mouse study for an anticancer drug runs in the 10-60k range (I can't give my exact quote at the moment). This is inexpensive.

The expensive stuff is when you go into humans.

I guess if you're outsourcing it? In my time in academia I knew labs that burned through $25,000 per month in mouse cage costs.

I can only guess what "five arms" you are referring to, but toxicity studies and efficacy studies often require different animals. Not just mice but transgenic mice, or nude mice with xenografts, etc. This has to be pricey to get the statistical power you need for a drug candidate.

I've also heard that the FDA likes to see more than one animal, so either rats or monkeys may be dosed as well. It all adds up.

Well no one is going to get a drug approved for the FDA exclusively from the garage, but there is a reasonable amount of initial stage research that you could conceivably do from your garage. My project is to push that out to the 'xenograft' stage, which in my opinion is close to the limit, if not the limit. Full disclosure, I'm doing the chemistry in a rented chemistry lab space because I don't want to suffocate myself with chloroform.

Five arms, refers to an experiment with three dosages, a null control and a positive control.

Yes, you can outsource things, which is exactly what I'm doing (it's cheaper and more ethical), but also the model has become really good where you don't have to sack an animal for each time point. That cuts down on costs by a lot.