I hope this produces some useful anti-venom that is cheaper and widely available. My kid was stung by a small bark scorpion on his thumb here in Arizona and I would not wish that experience on anyone. For hours afterwards he was in excruciating screaming pain, and he even lost his vision for while. That lasted about 24 hours and then it took weeks for him to recover feeling in his hand. Nothing seemed to help with the pain and there was very little we could do for him. I would love to have had a more available anti-venom, but apparently now it is so expensive they only keep it around for the very worst cases.
vhiremath4 18 minutes ago [-]
Can someone explain whether design of protein binders is an important rate-limiting step in drug creation (of which antivenom is a very small market)? Or AI-driven drug discovery in general? It feels like something that will definitely help the drug market but is nowhere near the rate-limiting step, but that's from my own researcher as someone without a background in it.
My understanding is that FDA trials (specifically phase 2 + 3) are the death valley for most drugs and finding a biomarker is something mostly done through a mix of gene bank scraping + looking at old biomarker databanks. The majority of the cost and time is in failed drugs that do not pass FDA trials (which average 6-7 years end-to-end).
Note: I am asking this in earnest. I am not trying to ask a leading question and saying it is not important at all.
dooglius 7 minutes ago [-]
The impression I have, which admittedly is purely as a layman reading articles, is that by far the rate-limiting factor in all drug creation is the cost of doing clinical trials in humans.
vhiremath4 2 minutes ago [-]
That's also my impression. If that's true, then that would mean we have a bunch more biomarkers but the failure rate of going to animal models -> phase 1 -> phase 2 -> phase 3 -> eventual pass likely relies on developing drugs that have a greater chance of passing phase 2 (and then 3). I don't see how we get there with faster design, although maybe that's the first step and then you pair with clinical data so the models understand some hyperdimensional relationship between chemistry and biology that humans are incapable of understanding?
MattGrommes 45 minutes ago [-]
This sounds awesome but I wish these would be published in a peer-reviewed journal or something of that nature. I can't believe these press releases they put out, even though I'm sure it's an achievement.
giancarlostoro 28 minutes ago [-]
They're trying to catch up to OpenAI which has been doing these a lot, but I agree, can we actually get them peer reviewed as a hard requirement? I think OpenAI would have some looked over by experts before posting their blog posts.
paimapi 29 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 20:00:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
My understanding is that FDA trials (specifically phase 2 + 3) are the death valley for most drugs and finding a biomarker is something mostly done through a mix of gene bank scraping + looking at old biomarker databanks. The majority of the cost and time is in failed drugs that do not pass FDA trials (which average 6-7 years end-to-end).
Note: I am asking this in earnest. I am not trying to ask a leading question and saying it is not important at all.