Comment by TheOtherHobbes
3 days ago
Jet engine design is iterative, and the basic principles are well-understood.
Drug design seems a lot more binary. You can find a new pathway, but drugs themselves are fairly simply molecules, and you can't iteratively 'fix bugs' the way you can in an engine or a piece of software.
The engine is a given, it's almost astronomically complicated, you know a lot less about how it works than you'd like to, and you're trying to change how it works while it's running without breaking anything, using tiny rigid parts that have to snap into place correctly and can't be bent to fit.
High failure rates aren't surprising.
This is a pretty outdated view, particularly with respect to biologics, which are some of the most complex structures humans fabricate. Many are in fact quite similar to iterative prototypes of jet engines.
You might have something like Anti–vascular endothelial growth factor therapy, where you have a binding target structure, and iterate the uses and molecular structure around it, or combine it with other structures and binding sites.
You might go from mab to fab, or to bispecific mab using CrossMab IgG architecture, or bispecific fab using dutafab fragment architechture. This analogizes to mixing and matching different jet engine technologies into different platofrms.
VEGF targeting biologics have netted >150 billion dollars to date, and this will only grow faster in the future.
iterative GLP-1 technologies will be much the same, where people are literally iteratively fixing bugs.
The development pipeline for both is littred with failed iterations.