Comment by mlboss
11 hours ago
Drug discovery is extremely regulated process and for the right reasons. It would be the last frontiers to conquer with AI.
11 hours ago
Drug discovery is extremely regulated process and for the right reasons. It would be the last frontiers to conquer with AI.
A valuable application not mentioned here is streamlining synthesis and manufacturing to lower the costs of current drugs. That would positively impact millions more people than a new treatment for advanced pancreatic cancer. But there's not as much potential profit so....
Manufacturing costs of most drugs are miniscule. Virtually all of their costs and from R&D and the regulatory process.
How exactly is there no potential for large profit there? I’d say there potential for huge profit if you reduce cost of manufacturing drugs!
The cost of manufacturing drugs is not where pharma makes it’s profits. Look at the margins for competitive generic drugs and over the counter medicine. Margins are tight.
Pharma makes bank on drugs that are patent protected. Squeezing the manufacturing cost is a small gain on top of that.
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After medicine, construction, flight, government, education and food production
What does flight have to do with anything else in that list? And what about it? Make it cheaper? Greener? Just odd to put such a specific mode of transportation in an otherwise broad list.
Mostly that planes already have good autopilot but still most crashes are due to human error. There is also a reasonably high barrier to entry to piloting. One that can majorly be removed by current autopilot + purpose built AI and anyone should be able to fly without much overhead.
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And yet they go for the arts first...
> Drug discovery is extremely regulated process
I actually don’t think this is a strong argument.
AI does very well following rules.
Proving your drug works is hard, but an LLM can help you come up with the ideas.
>AI does very well following rules.
How many of these "we sandboxed it and said not to do Y, but then it went and did it!" stories would you consider necessary to disprove that?
It may be good at following rules 99.99% of the time but if someone launches a million times more parallel agents than they would hire humans, it might still be much worse in practice...
"We've been told we must find an effective drug candidate here, and to follow this process for evaluating the quality of the candidate, but actually we could subtly change the analysis like this to make this candidate look favorable enough..."
(And then compare that to deterministic algorithms...)
We are not perfect as human beings, and we can’t expect AI, which is modeled after us to be perfect too. This fear of AI is irrational.
The argument here is that AI can run permutations faster than any human can. And, feeding it a company’s proprietary data about what worked, what did not, how it worked and so on can be invaluable at accelerating the discovery process of new drugs.
Plus, it can work 24/7/365.
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the thing is we are not short on "ideas" in the drug development process
Maybe AI would be better put to use helping us determine which ideas are good then
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Because human trials are so expensive that will be all the more reason to pre-screen with AI, like we already do with traditional simulations and things like proteome-wide off-target profiling.
There's no regulation on not doing a trial because your oracle machine told you it was an expensive dead end.