3 ms·

Why does he conclude there is no alternative? He already argued this would be strange in other disciplines. So reform it.

by calf 3mo ago

mlyle 3mo ago
If you can think of a way that you can have a much higher chance than 9% of success in getting a useful treatment to market, you can make a boatload of money. Go ahead, reform it.
- calf 3mo ago
  Not knowing of a way is inequivalent to inexistence of any way. This is basic and apparently some bloggers are bad writers and or political conservatives of the type "there is no alternative".
  - estearum 3mo ago
    The alternative is "have a complete mechanistic understanding of biology." People are definitely working on it, but we are nowhere close to as complete an understanding as we need. The evidence for precisely this claim is in the failure rate of clinical trials, into which we encode our best-known understanding of biology and we still end up being wrong 90% of the time. And that's not including all the pre-clinical candidates, which drive our wrongness rate (i.e. knowledge gap) to 99.99999%+
EA-3167 3mo ago
How? He’s saying that he can’t think of any good ones, and in my experience that’s true of most informed people. This is one of those hard problems that needs solutions, and so far the present system is the best anyone has managed.
- calf 3mo ago
  I don't care what he's "saying that" which is just your biased interpretation. His essay does not warrant the final concluding sentence which would require a different essay thesis. It's just basic high school reading and writing skills.
  - mlyle 3mo ago
    Again, anyone who cracks a decent success rate can basically print money. Unfortunately, despite lots of efforts in this area, we have not been able to get the clinical success rate up. It's pretty low effort to jeer from the outside and say "do better" for an industry that's been trying so many approaches to do so, without any ideas yourself. The techniques have gotten a lot more sophisticated, but unfortunately a lot of the low hanging, "easy" fruit have been used up. Biology is hard.
  - EA-3167 3mo ago
    It’s a shame we aren’t a basic high school reading class, that might help this conversation along to the inevitable conclusion that your opinions aren’t interesting without something substantial behind them. They’re still “valid”… but only to you.
estearum 3mo ago
You can go make literally a trillion dollars if you can come up with an alternative.
- calf 3mo ago
  Irrelevant hypothetical.
analog31 3mo ago
It's not for lack of trying. People are definitely trying to find better ways of finding stronger candidates earlier. People are trying to gain a more precise understanding of disease mechanisms. There are breakthroughs that I could have never imagined such as mRNA vaccines.
- calf 3mo ago
  I would have to reread the piece carefully but I don't think "lack of trying by Biopharma" is consistent with the author's main argument. Because he is still being somewhat critical of the way it is currently done (why he cites the other industries). I simply disagree with his final sentence since it requires a different set of essay arguments, and also is subjective in the way say a political centrist might say "there is no alternative to fossil fuels" etc.
  - asdff 3mo ago
    Most other industries barely innovate. Most industries are just buying off the shelf components and putting them together into larger widgets. Cars, computers, airplanes, that's the business. The components might get more efficient or performant but they generally do the thing they always did. If you squint it is basically the same car/plane/laptop as x years ago. They worked out the optimal car/plane/laptop shape a while ago and now everything sold is exactly that shape and will be for probably the rest of both of our lives and then some, in those industries. Life science on the other hand is actually on a bleeding edge. Something actually revolutionary might emerge tomorrow after a grad student has an acid trip tonight.
    - analog31 3mo ago
      Indeed, I work in one of those businesses that seems to barely innovate. Many of our "new" products are mainly necessitated by obsolescence of components and changing applications. As I explain to people: The laws of physics don't change, at least as they affect our technology. For instance the earliest CCD and the latest CMOS image sensor share a lot of the same basic physics, and are made from the same chemical element. In those industries, a person who deeply understands the theory behind the technology is assured of some job security. That's my job. One area that has experienced more rapid innovation is software. And maybe it's not quite at the failure rate of drug development, but I think it's noticeably higher than for most "hardware" projects.

Why does he conclude there is no alternative? He already argued this would be strange in other disciplines. So reform it.

by calf 3mo ago

Why does he conclude there is no alternative? He already argued this would be strange in other disciplines. So reform it.

mlyle 3mo ago

If you can think of a way that you can have a much higher chance than 9% of success in getting a useful treatment to market, you can make a boatload of money. Go ahead, reform it.

calf 3mo ago
Not knowing of a way is inequivalent to inexistence of any way. This is basic and apparently some bloggers are bad writers and or political conservatives of the type "there is no alternative".
- estearum 3mo ago
  The alternative is "have a complete mechanistic understanding of biology." People are definitely working on it, but we are nowhere close to as complete an understanding as we need. The evidence for precisely this claim is in the failure rate of clinical trials, into which we encode our best-known understanding of biology and we still end up being wrong 90% of the time. And that's not including all the pre-clinical candidates, which drive our wrongness rate (i.e. knowledge gap) to 99.99999%+

EA-3167 3mo ago

How? He’s saying that he can’t think of any good ones, and in my experience that’s true of most informed people. This is one of those hard problems that needs solutions, and so far the present system is the best anyone has managed.

calf 3mo ago
I don't care what he's "saying that" which is just your biased interpretation. His essay does not warrant the final concluding sentence which would require a different essay thesis. It's just basic high school reading and writing skills.
- mlyle 3mo ago
  Again, anyone who cracks a decent success rate can basically print money. Unfortunately, despite lots of efforts in this area, we have not been able to get the clinical success rate up. It's pretty low effort to jeer from the outside and say "do better" for an industry that's been trying so many approaches to do so, without any ideas yourself. The techniques have gotten a lot more sophisticated, but unfortunately a lot of the low hanging, "easy" fruit have been used up. Biology is hard.
- EA-3167 3mo ago
  It’s a shame we aren’t a basic high school reading class, that might help this conversation along to the inevitable conclusion that your opinions aren’t interesting without something substantial behind them. They’re still “valid”… but only to you.

estearum 3mo ago

You can go make literally a trillion dollars if you can come up with an alternative.

calf 3mo ago
Irrelevant hypothetical.

analog31 3mo ago

It's not for lack of trying. People are definitely trying to find better ways of finding stronger candidates earlier. People are trying to gain a more precise understanding of disease mechanisms. There are breakthroughs that I could have never imagined such as mRNA vaccines.

calf 3mo ago
I would have to reread the piece carefully but I don't think "lack of trying by Biopharma" is consistent with the author's main argument. Because he is still being somewhat critical of the way it is currently done (why he cites the other industries). I simply disagree with his final sentence since it requires a different set of essay arguments, and also is subjective in the way say a political centrist might say "there is no alternative to fossil fuels" etc.
- asdff 3mo ago
  Most other industries barely innovate. Most industries are just buying off the shelf components and putting them together into larger widgets. Cars, computers, airplanes, that's the business. The components might get more efficient or performant but they generally do the thing they always did. If you squint it is basically the same car/plane/laptop as x years ago. They worked out the optimal car/plane/laptop shape a while ago and now everything sold is exactly that shape and will be for probably the rest of both of our lives and then some, in those industries. Life science on the other hand is actually on a bleeding edge. Something actually revolutionary might emerge tomorrow after a grad student has an acid trip tonight.
  - analog31 3mo ago
    Indeed, I work in one of those businesses that seems to barely innovate. Many of our "new" products are mainly necessitated by obsolescence of components and changing applications. As I explain to people: The laws of physics don't change, at least as they affect our technology. For instance the earliest CCD and the latest CMOS image sensor share a lot of the same basic physics, and are made from the same chemical element. In those industries, a person who deeply understands the theory behind the technology is assured of some job security. That's my job. One area that has experienced more rapid innovation is software. And maybe it's not quite at the failure rate of drug development, but I think it's noticeably higher than for most "hardware" projects.