6 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsI told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
Their wordsTake Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict.
Their wordsIn biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.
Their wordsThat is mostly in the realm of chemistry and is intrinsically far more tractable and predictable; given a validated target, good teams usually reach a decent molecule.
Their wordsThe patent system then further disincentivizes companies from taking target risk, because it rewards novel chemical matter, not novel biology.
Their wordsA capability existing is not the same as a capability being absorbed into institutions, and, perhaps most important of all, translated into outcomes people care about.