3 ms·
This seems horribly naive and dramatically understates just how difficult drug development is. We simply don't understand enough of the complex interactions tha
by fabian2k 7y ago
This seems horribly naive and dramatically understates just how difficult drug development is. We simply don't understand enough of the complex interactions that happen in a biological organism, and in the end we have to do very expensive trial and error to determine whether any drug or intervention actually works.
- randcraw 7y agoYes to this. At the Very Big Pharma where I work about 20 years ago we took some baby steps toward adopting an engineering approach toward bio-based systems engineering. Systems biology and in silico modeling of disease had long promised to short circuit the protracted process of drug development. And maybe one day that may yet prove true. But after 15 years of building models of disease or therapy based on data gleaned from lab assays and preclinical/ clinical studies, we found that there were still far too many 'degrees of freedom' in the parameter space of interest to convince the biologists that our models could add sufficient real value to their work for our work to continue. Fortunately, medicinal chemists have fared better in silico, often employing computational techniques to reduce their search space for a compound desired behavior. But I think no one would describe their models of molecular docking / binding as manifestations of engineering or systems biology.