Comment by estearum

Testing a drug in a terminally ill person for something other than their illness is not going to produce meaningful data.

You misunderstand how hard it is to pull signal from a drug being put into a human body, which is why we need large numbers of people who meet extremely narrow criteria (and don't have things like a terminal cancer).

Your latter idea is a good one, and hopefully something AI will help with. As you imply: we will know empirically when it's ready because trial failure rates will trend toward zero. Today we're closer to 90% failures and not even clearly trending in the correct direction.

You're aware that, as a healthy volunteer, you could go sign up for a Phase 1 study today, right? You can even earn a pretty penny doing so.