"In a way, what he said sums up exactly what people who are PhDs in Molecular Biology tell me.  I asked a friend of mine who is a Business Development officer (and a PhD in Biology from NYU) for one of America's biggest pharma companies...and she said almost the same thing..."too good to be true"."

I'm somewhat surprised by this. If anything, folks with a doctorate in molecular biology or similar discipline should have a firm understanding of transcriptional machinery, epigenetic modifications to DNA and DNA/histone/chromatin structure. With this knowledge, one should appreciate how manipulation of key transcription factors, co-activators, or in our case BET bromodomain binding, can have genome wide effects on DNA/chromatin occupancy by these key transcriptional components and hence have profound effects on the expression of multiple different mRNAs at the same time. Not sure when your friend obtained her PhD, but it could be that she's been out of basic research for too long to appreciate the recent advances. Personally, I don't doubt the beneficial effects of apabetalone; I am more worried that adverse events related to the study drug will pop up with prolonged use. So far, so good, apparently, since the DSMB didn't stop the trial with some patients were on study drug for around 3 years and the median dosing likely being close to 24 months. 

BearDownAZ