Comment by braiamp
2 days ago
I had to look what "clinical failure rate" means and I think I got the answer in this paper [1] and... I'm not going to say that it is worrisome. Unlike other industries, we can't accurately model in the pre-prototype phase how something will behave in living beings. And to use the author examples, cars and airliners are big and way simpler to model than the complex pathways that you find in biology.
We are chipping away at that problem but it's not like we have it mostly solved as other engineering areas of knowledge. I would argue that due that phase I successes isn't the benchmark, but phase II success should be the actual measure. I'm sure that if someone charts the accumulative success rate for each phase of clinical trials, you will see that phase I is the most brutal one.
> I had to look what "clinical failure rate" means
That should have been the end if the comment; the follow-up by demonstrating such expertise just has me laughing.