Wednesday, October 7, 2026
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PX-2065
CORRESPONDENCE — SENT ON THE RECORD
INVENTED FOR A FICTIONAL NEWSPAPER

Reply to this newspaper's funding enquiry, from a pharmaceutical sponsor, declining to fund a phase III

Origin
A pharmaceutical company; the writer asked that the company be named and that he not be
Dated
3 March 2026
Extent
1 pages
Status
accepted
Redactions
The writer's name and direct line, at his request. Nothing else. The company is named in the full document.

Chain of custody

Sent by email in reply to an identical letter this newspaper sent to sixteen bodies. The writer telephoned before sending to ask whether we intended to publish replies in full. We said we did. He sent this anyway, and then sent a second message asking us to keep the fourth paragraph, which he said his legal department would have removed if he had shown it to them.

Held by: They Buried, document room; full email headers held

Excerpt

…I will give you the real answer rather than the one you were expecting.

It is not that we think it does not work. We have no view on whether it works,
because nobody has done the study that would tell us, which is your point.

It is that if we spend fifty-eight million dollars establishing that it works,
we will have established it for everyone. On the Monday after publication our
competitors may sell the same molecule, at the same price we sell it, having
spent nothing. There is no version of that decision I can put to a board.

I would add, since you asked for candour, that I do not think this is a good
system. I think it is a system that answers the questions somebody owns and
leaves the rest. I have worked in it for twenty-six years and I would change
this part of it if it were mine to change.

Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.

Editor's note

Nine of the eleven bodies that replied to us gave a reason. This is the only one that describes the mechanism instead of citing a remit, and it is the reason this story is about arithmetic rather than about villains.

Cited in