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Ask HN: What are the moonshots ideas to fight SARS-COV-2?
We are unable to adequately model the genetic and biological aspects of humans and how individual components (of a drug) affect those genetic/ biological components individually and in concert.
imagine someone who was crazy enough to say... we will try to 10x everything we have done to date and FINALLY do computer simulations at an unheard of scale and complexity and MAKE the modeling/digital testing breakthroughs that current people said were impossible.
- petra 7y agoThe biggest barriers are not basic r&d , but clinical trials, and economics/politics/manufacturing. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/when-will-a-coronavirus-vaccine-be-ready https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/when-will-a-co...
- saadalem 7y agoWhat do you think of moonshot ideas that could greatly accelerate human trials, like computer simulations of virus/vaccine/host cell interactions, something at a scale that humans have never demonstrated before ? If we had enough data on human reactions to vaccines we could hypothetically predict reactions to marginally different vaccines which would be a huge boost to the development of them. Like it's crazy to think that penicillin and similar fungi derivatives have a million antibiotic properties but when it comes to viruses we're stuck developing extremely narrow highly tailored antivirals and vaccines.
- petra 7y agoI'm not a biologist, so I really don't know whether that's feasible.
- buboard 7y agoYou can look at equivalent projects for understanding the brain: the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative. Impressive projects, but nowhere near the success of particle accelerators Like others said, many ways the virus could be deactivated are known. the problem is finding ways to deliver those solutions, and testing it in humans. It s a huge bottleneck, so a moonshot would be to test on artificial or artificially grown organs