The founder of the company that discovered the Sovaldi hepatitis C drug, which has been listed with a cost of $1,000 for a single pill, says that it’s fairly cheap to make the basic ingredients for this well-regarded new medicine. It may cost only about $1,400 to manufacture a 12-week supply, or 84 pills, of the key ingredient in Sovaldi, excluding the costs of manufacturing plants, solvents, formulation, encapsulating and marketing.

That’s the estimate that Raymond F. Schinazi, a founder of Pharmasset Inc. and a noted infectious-disease researcher at Emory University, put forward in a paper published in December in the journal Trends in Microbiology.

By now, Gilead Sciences Inc., which bought Pharmasset in January 2012 for $11.4 billion, may have brought down the production cost further, Schinazi said in a recent interview. “It could be even less than that,” Schinazi said.

Pharmaceutical companies have long experience with making pills, with some products having been made in large scale for more than a century.

“Even aspirin, but they still charge you a significant markup for that,” Schinazi said. “With new drugs like Sovaldi, or sofosbuvir as we used to call it, the company needs to recover its investment in research.”