[–] cma 2 days ago
There's no regulation on not doing a trial because your oracle machine told you it was an expensive dead end.
[–] gnabgib 2 days ago
[–] bronco21016 2 days ago
[–] hattmall 2 days ago
[–] helpyou840 2 days ago
Being a doctor in America has a high barrier to entry.
It’s not because medical science is difficult.
It’s because the American Medical Association (aka, doctor’s union) limits the number of new doctors and medical students each year.
If you 2x the number of medical students, resulting in 1.5x number of qualified doctors, resulting in perhaps 20-30% lower salaries, and maybe 5-10% lower cost to patients.
But no, preserving a doctor’s middle-class salary is more important than lowering patients’ costs.
[–] jimmymcgee73 2 days ago
Google “number medical students over time”
Then google “number residency slots over time”
Then notice how both of them have been increasing significantly over time.
Then compare the income percentile for doctors in US vs say Canada, Australia etc. all are top 1-3%. Doctors are paid well relative to median salary in every first world country.
Then google “physician percent healthcare costs” and learn that physician pay is about 8-10% of total healthcare spending. Then realize about 40% of that $ immediately goes back to the government via various taxes, so even if you paid physicians nothing you’d only save about 5% of healthcare spending.
Do you not try to verify any information you read before confidently regurgitating it at a later point? You really should…
[–] consensus1 1 day ago
[–] jimmymcgee73 1 day ago
[–] judge2020 2 days ago
[–] fn-mote 2 days ago
I actually don’t think this is a strong argument.
AI does very well following rules.
Proving your drug works is hard, but an LLM can help you come up with the ideas.
[–] majormajor 2 days ago
How many of these "we sandboxed it and said not to do Y, but then it went and did it!" stories would you consider necessary to disprove that?
It may be good at following rules 99.99% of the time but if someone launches a million times more parallel agents than they would hire humans, it might still be much worse in practice...
"We've been told we must find an effective drug candidate here, and to follow this process for evaluating the quality of the candidate, but actually we could subtly change the analysis like this to make this candidate look favorable enough..."
(And then compare that to deterministic algorithms...)
[–] ExoticPearTree 2 days ago
The argument here is that AI can run permutations faster than any human can. And, feeding it a company’s proprietary data about what worked, what did not, how it worked and so on can be invaluable at accelerating the discovery process of new drugs.
Plus, it can work 24/7/365.
[–] watwut 2 days ago
People who behave like OpenAI and Antropic AI does when controlled by those companies get punished instead of celebrated.
[–] BeratnaGas 2 days ago
[–] johncolanduoni 2 days ago
[–] azan_ 2 days ago
[–] moregrist 2 days ago
Pharma makes bank on drugs that are patent protected. Squeezing the manufacturing cost is a small gain on top of that.
[–] somenameforme 2 days ago
If a big pharma had the choice between an expensive treatment that could help treat any cancer, or an extremely cheap treatment that could prevent any cancer - which would they pick? The answer when you're motivated by profit is unfortunately different than the one when you're motivated by social benefit. And this is more than just a thought experiment because this issue is going to drive which type of treatments are pursued.
[–] wuschel 1 day ago
Picking the right drug is a lottery game in itself that involves portfolio strategy, biologic modeling of your product efficacy and safety, optimization of yields, and "field testing". Then you still have to build the right distribution channels to the patient and find someone to pay for your product. Even reproducing drugs is not a trivial thing, as you need to re-certify production plants. In the case of biologics it is even more complicated.
Unless we burn enormous amounts of cash or set up specific incentives, there is not way we can bring primary socially motivated drugs to the market with the current risk structure of the industry.
Pharma is one of the most complex playing fields there is. The sad thing is that we might strongly overstimate the ability to significantly improve the development of new drugs through AI in the next 10 years.
[–] somenameforme 1 day ago
[–] Ekaros 1 day ago
Get million out of thousand people or ten out of billion people... Later would be preferable.
[–] somenameforme 1 day ago
[–] azan_ 1 day ago
Yes, and reducing manufacturing cost if you have tight margin has huge potential for profit.