How else would you pay for top-calibur talent to sold the problem?
Yes, research take time. Yes, medical research is extraordinary hard. It still doesn't excuse our slowness. We need to look at fighting diseases as a war, not a scientific exploration project. Science is good, but solutions are better. We don't need to understand in extreme details how cancer work, we just need a way to defeat cancer.
[Update]
Please include include links that discuss the "better" method that you are describing. It sounds like you just want to "reinvent/disrupt" the process without actually having a plan.
We don't want to wait ten years for a slightly higher chance of a cure appearing. We want a higher chance of a cure in a much shorter time period.
Please include include links that discuss the "better" method that you are describing. It sounds like you just want to "reinvent/disrupt" the process without actually having a plan.
It's not a "plan", or a "method". It's a goal.
You could start with a small. Figure out what people are doing that should be done by robots or computers. What mistakes people are making that delay the whole research process? Are the bureaucrats holding up the approval for no good reason? How much time you spent fighting politics versus getting things done?
The key insight is this: Speeds absolutely matter in medicine. One more day you wait for a cure, somebody die. If speed is not one of your nation's research goal, it should be.
What that means is the search space is huge, much larger than any space I've dealt with in computer science.
However, there may be something to what you are saying (I don't know enough about medical research to know whether they are already doing this or not). In public key cryptography, you have a huge key space to try if you want to brute force a key (2^64 for a 64 bit key, unsurprisingly). However, you can break a 64 bit key in about 2^40 operations if you use the right technique [1]. Are we spending enough time looking for those techniques? I certainly hope so. There are a lot of smart people in medicine.
I am not naive about the difficulty of the problem.
Are we spending enough time looking for those techniques?
We aren't necessarily looking for better techniques all the time. It could simply be streamlining a step or two in order to make medical research loop tighter. It could mean eliminating a process or two that shouldn't be running.
Whatever the case, our researchers should be thinking about novel solutions to the problem instead of mechanically running the lab. The world fastest machine might not be able to make an intractable problem tractable, but it shouldn't be a bottleneck.