refoundable

6 ms·

1.
by refoundable 6y ago
> Why do you think that cheaper development costs will ultimately lead to lower drug prices? If the cost of drug development were to drop by a factor of 100-1000, say from the $3B it costs today to the $3-30M range, that would likely unl
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by refoundable 6y ago
Thanks for the great catch. Fixed.
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by refoundable 6y ago
That's certainly what's implied by Scannell's answer to Question 8, but such a solution comes with its own set of limitations related to design by committee. Small startup teams are still the most effective way to solve hard
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by refoundable 6y ago
No disagreement on the skewed stats. And I won't dispute the need for a minimum standard of efficacy. However, if anything, the problem that we've had over the last 60 years is setting the standard of efficacy too high. This cause
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by refoundable 6y ago
On angiogenesis, see Judah Folkman: https://www.tobinproject.org/about/judah-folkman On cancer immunotherapy, see Fran Visco's story as partially told by Daniel Sarewitz (section titled "War on Cancer"):
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by refoundable 6y ago
I echo both observations and urge you to name that law. Will look under the hood at the CSS.
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by refoundable 6y ago
It's worth noting that the most effectives breakthroughs against cancer in recent decades (Immunotherapy, angiogenesis-suppressing drugs) have largely been based on ideas that were first dismissed and widely ridiculed by senior scienti
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by refoundable 6y ago
You're right on the money. Any breakthrough that could either dramatically shorten the feedback cycle (from years to weeks), or reduce the cost of drug development by 100-1000x would unlock so much value as to completely reshape the st
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by refoundable 6y ago
I see no reason why we can't do both. We obviously need better drugs for the diseases we haven't yet cured, and we need cheaper drugs for the diseases we've already cured. The two are related yet distinct problems. Incidental
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by refoundable 6y ago
> Having better tox models seems like the highest value, albeit very difficult, route here. Which to me is a separate, more general, problem than a specific disease model. Agreed. Better toxicity testing would go a long way towards solvi
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by refoundable 6y ago
I agree that discovery is far from a straight-forward process, and that many of the cavalier ways in which it happened in decades past would be criminally prosecuted and beyond the pale today. But I don't think that there was ever much
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by refoundable 6y ago
The FDA does not allow Pharma companies to create safe and slightly less effective drugs than the best-in-class, even if such drugs were 10-100x cheaper and would thus alleviate most people's complaints about outrageous drug prices. Sc
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by refoundable 6y ago
Most people tend to focus on the cost side of Eroom's law, but I find its most disturbing implication to be the other side: That between 1950 and 2010, we got ~100x worse at finding drugs that actually work. That suggests that there&#x
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by refoundable 6y ago
Thank you. It takes a fair bit of time to put something like this together, so I appreciate your kind words.
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by refoundable 6y ago
Author here. I interviewed Jack Scannell on the hypothesis that the man who wrote the now famous paper on Eroom's law would likely have many more insights to offer that didn't necessarily make it into print. One of the oddest thin
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by refoundable 6y ago
A more accurate definition pulled from the introduction: > Eroom’s law is the observation that the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubled every nine years from 1950 through 2010. All in all, it shows a roughly 80-fold decline in t
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by refoundable 6y ago
No idea what's causing this for you. Can you say a bit more about your setup?