Release, I'm pretty sure drug manufacturers work for many years to bring a drug to market. They need to pay employees to formulate the drugs, pay doctors and all other associated personnel for animal studies, clinical trials, etc. Drugs aren't like other products where you draw up a plan, tweak it, produce it and put it on the market. It is highly regulated and the regulations change from country to country and from year to year - never making things easier, but always more complex. You not only need your development crew, but a healthy team of lawyers and doctors on the payroll for liabilities. I don't know the number of lawsuits that have probably been filed against the manufacturer for the pen, most of them certainly gratuitous and bogus, but I'm sure it's an amount that would boggle your mind if it were made public, as would the cost to the company for defending against them. You aren't paying for the manufacturing cost, you are paying for the 10 year development cycle and the hundreds of peoples salaries and partial salaries that accrued over that 10 year period, the huge liabilities always present when dealing with medical products and services, the cost of complying to a rats nest of regulation, and yes - a profit for the manufacturer. As for the reason why the price was raised dramatically over a short period of time - I don't know. But I suspect it was driven more by outside forces acting upon the company (i.e. changes in government reimbursement or mandated insurance allowances) than that it was an attempt to maximize profits by bilking the heck out of folks like you that have to pay out of pocket - which is probably a very small percentage of their customer profile for this drug. The drug companies can't just come out and straight up blame the government since that same entity has the power to force them to withdraw their products from the market at any time.
All speculation on my part since I don't work for the company that produces them, but I tend to believe that this is probably more of an unintended consequence of government greed than it is a direct reflection of corporate greed.