4 ms·

What would the costs look like if the market scaled up by 1000 or 10000x?

by freepor 7y ago

acqq 7y ago
The cost comes from the nonscalability of both the production and the use.
- jlokier 7y ago
  What are the main obstacles to scalability of production and of use? Could the former be amenable to treatment as an engineering problem? There are a lot of motivated engineering minds right now.
  - acqq 7y ago
    I'm not a professional in that area, just based on what I've read, so in case of doubt, check better sources: If you use human donors, you need trained doctors spending time and equipment to select the donors, handle the donors, take care of them during the donation which takes hours (the needle is stuck in their vein during that time), trained professionals using expensive equipment to process the donation, and then trained doctors to perform the infusion on the patient, an hour or two, but you still want keep the patient in the hospital overnight in case of complications, which do happen often enough that it was practice to do so: as in, once in thousand. At the end all that work, it is relatively sure that the described work could result in protection of exactly one patient more than before you started. The percentage of known complications and the potential for failure in every step is what makes it non scalable. With non human donors you can avoid some work, but the second part remains: it's not "just a shot" like when you do a vaccination which is scalable. And while vaccination is scalable, if you're going to vaccinate billions, you also want to be very sure you aren't harming them, that's why speeding up vaccine production is not scalable. Even producing the vaccines is not easy at all to scale. It's not that nobody has attempted hard to achieve this up to now.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      Thanks, that's quite informative. In a critical situation such as the pandemic, it seems to me, from a project management and engineering perspective, that it might be worth ramping up production of a vaccine (or several) even before it has passed later stage trials, and maybe even pre-distribute it a bit to national storage facilities. So if the trials look great and the side effects are sufficiently minimal, the delay for manufacture and distribution will be reduced after the trials. But I guess I see all sorts of political problems with that, if the trials are good but the side effects are a problem, or say it causes a horrible desease for 0.1% of people down the line. The pressure to use the product would be immense, despite the trial saying no this is not safe.
      - acqq 7y ago
        Long term, THE major problem is the expectation to profit every time, stupidly, nobody with the money cares if one of that times the whole world gets infected: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-take-to-develop-a-coronavirus-vaccine https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-ta... "There may never be a market for a vaccine at the end of the development process, because the epidemic is contained, or never comes to pass. Then, traditionally, if there is an epidemic, it may take hold in a developing country where the costs of research and development cannot be recouped. “The resources and expertise sit in biotech and pharma, and they’ve got their business model,” Grant said. “They’re not charities. They can’t do this stuff for free.”" The "investors" just want the growth of their money, even the money they make would become meaningless after the pandemics that's efficient enough. The nature is indeed capable to set its own growth not caring about the "interests of investors." Obviously the whole structure as well as the priorities just have to be set differently. The next time could be even much worse than now. Which must be a political decision for change, not a technological "invention". The technology is not a "deux ex machina" -- the natural limitations are real. Some solutions exist but simply can't be expected to "make profit every time." So how can it be done? Taxes. What was too dangerous selling point for generations of politicians? "Less taxes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina But the taxes are even now used, and spent in mind boggling amount, just for other priorities, year after year: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike-fighter-program.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike...

What would the costs look like if the market scaled up by 1000 or 10000x?

acqq 7y ago

The cost comes from the nonscalability of both the production and the use.

jlokier 7y ago
What are the main obstacles to scalability of production and of use? Could the former be amenable to treatment as an engineering problem? There are a lot of motivated engineering minds right now.
- acqq 7y ago
  I'm not a professional in that area, just based on what I've read, so in case of doubt, check better sources: If you use human donors, you need trained doctors spending time and equipment to select the donors, handle the donors, take care of them during the donation which takes hours (the needle is stuck in their vein during that time), trained professionals using expensive equipment to process the donation, and then trained doctors to perform the infusion on the patient, an hour or two, but you still want keep the patient in the hospital overnight in case of complications, which do happen often enough that it was practice to do so: as in, once in thousand. At the end all that work, it is relatively sure that the described work could result in protection of exactly one patient more than before you started. The percentage of known complications and the potential for failure in every step is what makes it non scalable. With non human donors you can avoid some work, but the second part remains: it's not "just a shot" like when you do a vaccination which is scalable. And while vaccination is scalable, if you're going to vaccinate billions, you also want to be very sure you aren't harming them, that's why speeding up vaccine production is not scalable. Even producing the vaccines is not easy at all to scale. It's not that nobody has attempted hard to achieve this up to now.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Thanks, that's quite informative. In a critical situation such as the pandemic, it seems to me, from a project management and engineering perspective, that it might be worth ramping up production of a vaccine (or several) even before it has passed later stage trials, and maybe even pre-distribute it a bit to national storage facilities. So if the trials look great and the side effects are sufficiently minimal, the delay for manufacture and distribution will be reduced after the trials. But I guess I see all sorts of political problems with that, if the trials are good but the side effects are a problem, or say it causes a horrible desease for 0.1% of people down the line. The pressure to use the product would be immense, despite the trial saying no this is not safe.
    - acqq 7y ago
      Long term, THE major problem is the expectation to profit every time, stupidly, nobody with the money cares if one of that times the whole world gets infected: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-take-to-develop-a-coronavirus-vaccine https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-ta... "There may never be a market for a vaccine at the end of the development process, because the epidemic is contained, or never comes to pass. Then, traditionally, if there is an epidemic, it may take hold in a developing country where the costs of research and development cannot be recouped. “The resources and expertise sit in biotech and pharma, and they’ve got their business model,” Grant said. “They’re not charities. They can’t do this stuff for free.”" The "investors" just want the growth of their money, even the money they make would become meaningless after the pandemics that's efficient enough. The nature is indeed capable to set its own growth not caring about the "interests of investors." Obviously the whole structure as well as the priorities just have to be set differently. The next time could be even much worse than now. Which must be a political decision for change, not a technological "invention". The technology is not a "deux ex machina" -- the natural limitations are real. Some solutions exist but simply can't be expected to "make profit every time." So how can it be done? Taxes. What was too dangerous selling point for generations of politicians? "Less taxes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina But the taxes are even now used, and spent in mind boggling amount, just for other priorities, year after year: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike-fighter-program.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike...