Comment by timr
9 hours ago
> Seems like they're improving a $20 part of a billion dollar process, and a part that was already heavily using state of the art AI/simulation at that. The computers already spit out more potential candidates than what can be reasonably tested in vitro.
This is the fundamental problem with nearly all tech-meets-drugs startups. They almost always focus on the part of the problem where there isn't a bottleneck, because the parts where there is a bottleneck are the parts we don't understand at all.
> This is the fundamental problem with nearly all tech-meets-drugs startups. They almost always focus on the part of the problem where there isn't a bottleneck, because the parts where there is a bottleneck are the parts we don't understand at all.
Are they doing the thing where they develop the technology first, then hunt around for problems for it to solve and hype up potential applications?
Sort of. There’s also a big helping of intellectual arrogance, wherein the tech people think they can apply their l33t skills to biology, and get the same results (I say this as a person who has spent a non-trivial portion of my life as one of those people.)
That said, the LLM version of this is perhaps more solution-seeking-problem than past iterations. LLMs are obviously useful [1]. Scientists already use them. The labs are just desperate to find a multi-billion-dollar application outside of coding, and they’ve all decided that “drug development” is lucrative, so they're gonna apply their magic to that problem and collect profits!
[1] In the way that photocopiers are useful in drug development: as a tool. A powerful tool, but still a tool.
I don’t see the issue really though, if the $20 part still produces something more likely to get through the billion dollar parts what’s the problem ?
It doesn’t. That’s what I mean when I tell you the bottleneck is somewhere else. Obviously everyone claims that they do this with new technology X, but empirically, it isn’t helpful.
Re-ranking pre-clinical leads is the scientific equivalent of that old saying about opinions.
Few years back many SWE people would say, including me, that the bottleneck is not in coding. We were all very wrong.
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