alt Hacker NewsMore than that, as I understand it, coming up with drugs is not the bottleneck. It’s all the testing and clinical trials that take forever. Drug companies optimize this by having multiple irons in the fire at any time, but it’s not even like AI would help there. The work is in shepherding drugs through the approval process.
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90% of drugs fail in the phase 1-3 trials. If AI could create drug candidates that fail less often, that would be a huge win. I doubt it can right now, and it would take years to decades and billions of dollars to figure out if the AI is actually better at that than humans.
I'm so sick of this argument.
All AI has to do is catch problems earlier in the pipeline to outcome success rates.
You just have to think about the system wholisticly, the ways that AI could make trials more consistently positive are many. Moving the needle on any process upstream of the bottleneck benefits greatly. Currently something like 80% of trials fail, so without changing trial rate you have 5x potential sitting on the table.
To clarify, it's not the approval process that's challenging. It's making a safe and effective drug, then proving that it's safe and effective. If you achieve those, approval is pretty much trivial.