Subaita Rahman

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on the atlas — 2

highlights — 12

The biotech sector is experiencing the most severe downturn of at least the last 20 years. There have been many other downturns in the more recent past, but they have not been as deep and they have been shorter. In some cases, they were decoupled from the broader economy. This one is different.
Biotech’s Dulcius Ex Asperis: The Way Through This Downturn — RApport
can we come up with a way of making drugs that is guaranteed to be safe? Then we might get somewhere.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
dedicated non-academic non-profit research organizations.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
If we want to make progress in biology, we need a high-status way for top biology researchers to keep doing research, in the same way that DeepMind, OpenAI, FAIR, etc. have created a new high-status way for AI researchers to keep doing research. We need to create a new career path.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
It seems to me that the unreliability of the literature, however, will mean that for the foreseeable future (essentially until we have fully parameterized lab automation), AIs will be better at suggesting experiments and interpreting results than they will be at drawing conclusions from existing literature.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
he primary questions here will be: what fraction of knowledge in the world can be generalized from knowledge already in the literature, and how valuable is literature synthesis when a large portion of it is incorrect?
Why is progress in biology so slow?
he first problem is simple: biology is too diverse. Every disease, every gene, every organism, and every cell type is its own grand challenge.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
ML may help us design better experiments and interpret those experiments better, but those experiments will still need to be done, and that will take time.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
Serious drug developers have long since learned not to trust animal models when it comes to predicting the efficacy of a treatment for most diseases. (This should NOT be construed as an argument that animal research is unimportant in general; animal models are essential for many aspects of biomedical research, just not usually for drug efficacy.)
Why is progress in biology so slow?
But the result is that it takes 100 times longer to try a new idea in humans than it does to try the same idea in mice. And, for most diseases, there’s really no substitute for trying an idea in a human being.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
If you can do experiments once a day, you will learn things 5 times faster than if you can do experiments once a week. The goal of biomedical research is to cure human disease. In the biomedical industry at the moment, it takes about 10 or 20 years to conduct an experiment in which you try to cure human disease. We are still trying to support or disprove the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimer’s disease, which dates from the 1990s.
Why is progress in biology so slow?
Consider that among 477 loss-generating development-stage public biotech companies valued between $50M and $10B, 109 are trading below cash, which, as my colleague explained, hardly means they couldn’t drop further.
Biotech’s Dulcius Ex Asperis: The Way Through This Downturn (Bionic Reading) — RApport