"poor decisions on what drugs to push forward. A good lesson."
That's the blessing and curse of small biotechs and their relationships with big pharma and the FDA.
Once a thinly funded biotech commits to a particular approach, they can't afford to go back and start over when they realize there are problems. To a large degree, big pharma outsourced R&D to bioech startups (and those who invest in them) rather than take the risk upon themselves or pay the money to go back and try again if Plan A is not the best approach to a particular disease.
Clinical trials are expensive, so cutting the number of patients enrolled to the bare bones needed to get believable statistics often leads to failures from dropouts, poor data collection, and random events such as an enrollee getting killed in a car accident.
Upping the number of patients in Phase 2 clinical trials would give a better idea of what really does or does not work.
The FDA is there to say "NO" to bad ideas, which brings them no end of grief from patients and investors. (Or lawsuits if they say "YES" to something with an unforeseen problem.)
The word "scam" applies when management knows they are shooting blanks, but won't get several hundred thousand a year in salary if they admit it.
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