Comment by calf
2 days ago
Why does he conclude there is no alternative? He already argued this would be strange in other disciplines. So reform it.
2 days ago
Why does he conclude there is no alternative? He already argued this would be strange in other disciplines. So reform it.
If you can think of a way that you can have a much higher chance than 9% of success in getting a useful treatment to market, you can make a boatload of money. Go ahead, reform it.
Not knowing of a way is inequivalent to inexistence of any way. This is basic and apparently some bloggers are bad writers and or political conservatives of the type "there is no alternative".
The alternative is "have a complete mechanistic understanding of biology." People are definitely working on it, but we are nowhere close to as complete an understanding as we need. The evidence for precisely this claim is in the failure rate of clinical trials, into which we encode our best-known understanding of biology and we still end up being wrong 90% of the time. And that's not including all the pre-clinical candidates, which drive our wrongness rate (i.e. knowledge gap) to 99.99999%+
How? He’s saying that he can’t think of any good ones, and in my experience that’s true of most informed people. This is one of those hard problems that needs solutions, and so far the present system is the best anyone has managed.
I don't care what he's "saying that" which is just your biased interpretation. His essay does not warrant the final concluding sentence which would require a different essay thesis. It's just basic high school reading and writing skills.
Again, anyone who cracks a decent success rate can basically print money. Unfortunately, despite lots of efforts in this area, we have not been able to get the clinical success rate up.
It's pretty low effort to jeer from the outside and say "do better" for an industry that's been trying so many approaches to do so, without any ideas yourself.
The techniques have gotten a lot more sophisticated, but unfortunately a lot of the low hanging, "easy" fruit have been used up. Biology is hard.
It’s a shame we aren’t a basic high school reading class, that might help this conversation along to the inevitable conclusion that your opinions aren’t interesting without something substantial behind them. They’re still “valid”… but only to you.
You can go make literally a trillion dollars if you can come up with an alternative.
Irrelevant hypothetical.
It's not for lack of trying. People are definitely trying to find better ways of finding stronger candidates earlier. People are trying to gain a more precise understanding of disease mechanisms.
There are breakthroughs that I could have never imagined such as mRNA vaccines.
I would have to reread the piece carefully but I don't think "lack of trying by Biopharma" is consistent with the author's main argument. Because he is still being somewhat critical of the way it is currently done (why he cites the other industries). I simply disagree with his final sentence since it requires a different set of essay arguments, and also is subjective in the way say a political centrist might say "there is no alternative to fossil fuels" etc.
Most other industries barely innovate. Most industries are just buying off the shelf components and putting them together into larger widgets. Cars, computers, airplanes, that's the business. The components might get more efficient or performant but they generally do the thing they always did. If you squint it is basically the same car/plane/laptop as x years ago. They worked out the optimal car/plane/laptop shape a while ago and now everything sold is exactly that shape and will be for probably the rest of both of our lives and then some, in those industries.
Life science on the other hand is actually on a bleeding edge. Something actually revolutionary might emerge tomorrow after a grad student has an acid trip tonight.
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