The article is completely misleading in this regard. Every modern clinical trial looks for these sub-populations. The article even states: Sixty percent of

The article is completely misleading in this regard. Every modern clinical trial looks for these sub-populations. The article even states: Sixty percent of the new drugs in the works at Genentech/Roche are being developed with a companion diagnostic test to identify the patients who are most likely to benefit. That said, it is extremely frequent that clinical trials that follow up on these sub-population observances find them to be statistical anomalies. When you have 100 ways to subdivide your populations, you expect to have some anomalies at a typical 5% confidence level. The article points to I-SPY 2 as the future of clinical trials, making it sound like bayesian analysis is something novel to solely this clinical trial. As is alluded to in what you call the "defensive blog post", this is now standard practice in clinical trial design at most pharma companies. These companies don't like to throw 9 figures down the drain and they recognize that adaptive trial designs can get them statistical significance at lower cost while determining optimal treatment.