What is the hard part then? My read from here is that it is testing drugs on humans, or rather getting the approvals needed to begin human trials. Is this understanding correct?
yes. you have to recruit a diverse and representative population, which is very difficult and time-consuming. then, you have to spend several years conducting the trial. most of the time, the drug either has no effect or is actively harmful. 90% of drugs that go to clinical trials fail!
Is simulating the effects on humans not an option? Or is it that simulation technologies are not good (accurate) enough?
Thank you for entertaining my curiosity! I have been meaning to educate myself on this but don't know anybody in my circle who is knowledgeable in this field.
Humans are incredibly complex systems (and systems of systems) and our knowledge of how these systems work and interact is very limited despite the amount of work put into improving our understanding of them.
We can try to simulate the interaction between a drug and a protein, but most of the time the data to say what the downstream effects (if any) are simply does not exist. This is further complicated by the fact that these downstream effects can be extremely varied depending on both the tissue/disease you are targeting and the person you are treating.
Of course we are always generating more data from more diverse populations and more conditions, but there is a very very long way to being able to simulate drug trials like this.
We know so little about biology that the only way to do it is test on humans.
In another comment I said that if the area of biology/microbiology etc were the size of the surface of our sun, the area of our knowledge in those subjects would be perhaps a square millimeter.
And if you think that’s bad, don’t get me started on higher level areas like neurology.
nowhere near accurate enough, i would estimate we would need 2-3 more orders of magnitude of data to make something remotely useful - i'm not a biologist though
[–] diomedes 2 days ago
[–] avilay 2 days ago
Thank you for entertaining my curiosity! I have been meaning to educate myself on this but don't know anybody in my circle who is knowledgeable in this field.
[–] eranee 1 day ago
We can try to simulate the interaction between a drug and a protein, but most of the time the data to say what the downstream effects (if any) are simply does not exist. This is further complicated by the fact that these downstream effects can be extremely varied depending on both the tissue/disease you are targeting and the person you are treating.
Of course we are always generating more data from more diverse populations and more conditions, but there is a very very long way to being able to simulate drug trials like this.
[–] gumby 1 day ago
In another comment I said that if the area of biology/microbiology etc were the size of the surface of our sun, the area of our knowledge in those subjects would be perhaps a square millimeter.
And if you think that’s bad, don’t get me started on higher level areas like neurology.
[–] diomedes 1 day ago