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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

Despite what the article says, this can't be more complicated than producing 5 nm process chips. It's just less funded.

I have worked in both semiconductor manufacturing and drug discovery industries. Reliably and profitably producing 5 nm chips is an extreme engineering challenge, but- it is an engineering challenge. Drug discovery is a question of science and requires a fundamentally different mindset that semiconductor manufacturing. Human biology is much more complicated than manufacturing chips (and that is extremely complicated); drug discovery is about "unknown unknowns". Discovering a drug that has the intended effects without causing terrible adverse effects is something that some of the best-funded companies on the planet struggle with.

Some of the best-funded companies on the planet also struggle to produce 5nm chips.

But this isn't about drugs. This is about editing genes to manufacture T cells. That's a lot more like engineering than drug trials.

Not in medicine, but I don't think that's true. It's very hard to understand what all the consequences are going to be when you manufacture those T cells, and you also have to figure out what to manufacture in the first place, based on experimental trial and error.

I've done some engineering and drug development...

Image trying to write code where you can't actually see what you wrote, where each time you compile it costs $1000 and the binary randomly is corrupted 50% of the time. And the only way to find out is to push it to prod and wait a few months for someone to call you. And every prod setup is subtly different without any documentation. That's about 100x easier than drug development.

The nature of cutting edge stuff, regardless of the field, is that the process barely works, and costs a lot.

Drugs ultimately have to be converted from the lab to mass production. How is it any different, they all require research, iteration, and ultimately (hopefully) engineered mass production?

Making safe and effective medicines is a lot harder than modern chip production because the subject is humans and we have to do medicine ethically.

The pharmaceutical industry predates chiptech by quite some time, represents a fairly large market, the companies are quite technological, but the underlying problems are very different from making chips. And if trials like this succeed, that area of biotech will see billions in funding.

It's not funded as much as chips but it's also a smaller overall market.

> this can't be more complicated than producing 5 nm process chips

Chips don't randomly decide to unmake themselves: there's no active, living system you're interacting with.

The other thing that makes biology so confounding is its diversity. E.g. something that works without side effect for 100,000 people will kill 1 of them, because they were in some way different than the others.

The regulation and risk-aversion is far more impactful than the funding.

It's not entirely unwarranted regulation, but fundamentally Intel can mess up 20 batches of 5nm chips before getting it right, and nobody cares. If a CRISPR trial kills someone, it's a BIG DEAL, and could potentially set the field back by years.

Biology is OOM more complicated than electronics, IMHO. (Background in software then joined UH Cancer Center in 2018)

You think the cancer / biotech industry is less funded than 5 nm nodes?

Cancer finding doesn’t all go to any one approach, so you can draw the lines fairly arbitrarily around each problem.

Yes. I think any of the major sport franchise is more well funded than most forms of cancer research.

High performance computers bring far higher economic benefits than curing some types of cancer, so naturally they are better funded.

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