Because of the potential upside. If your potential market is “all aging people”, that’s a pretty big market. Even better when you realize that as people are ol

Because of the potential upside. If your potential market is “all aging people”, that’s a pretty big market. Even better when you realize that as people are older, they have more money, so the market you’re targeting tends to have more money to spend on medical expenses. Now, couple that with a highly competitive landscape where the first to market will capture the vast majority of that market and you can see how some steps might get skipped. Finally, if we did have random results in clinical trials, if you had 20 companies running a trial, you could expect at one of them to randomly have a positive trial (p <= 0.05). So you could have “promising” results for a small trial that would only fail once you had a larger number of participants. The market incentives and potential for lost opportunities were probably enough to justify a larger risk for some companies.