I'm not an expert in drug development, but even I was really skeptical when reading the Washington Post article on Pfizer "burying" the Alzheimer results. Derek Lowe (an actual drug discovery chemist) did put out on article with his thoughts on the article, which were similarly damning: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/06/06/a-...
The impression the original article gave was that the company ignored compelling evidence because they couldn't make any money off of it. But the "compelling evidence" actually comes across more like the sort of thing you'd find here: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations . As Derek Lowe puts it, "One of the biggest objections to the idea inside the company was that this finding was unlikely to be real because Enbrel doesn’t really penetrate into the brain."
A final coda: the actual data may not have been public, but the potential correlative results were published in 2010: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478733/. So much for being buried?
The impression the original article gave was that the company ignored compelling evidence because they couldn't make any money off of it. But the "compelling evidence" actually comes across more like the sort of thing you'd find here: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations . As Derek Lowe puts it, "One of the biggest objections to the idea inside the company was that this finding was unlikely to be real because Enbrel doesn’t really penetrate into the brain."
A final coda: the actual data may not have been public, but the potential correlative results were published in 2010: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478733/. So much for being buried?