We don't need an army of high school sophomores, unless they are in the lab pipetting. The expensive part of drug discovery is not the ideation phase, it is the time and labor spent running experiments and synthesizing analogues.
We have a couple automation systems that are semi-custom - the robot can handle operation of highly specific, non-standard instruments that 99.9% of labs aren't running. Systems have to handle very accurate pipetting of small volumes (microliters), moving plates to different stations, heating, shaking, tracking barcodes, dispensing and racking fresh pipette tips, etc. Different protocols/experiments and workflows can require vastly different setups.
See something like:
[1] https://www.hamiltoncompany.com/automated-liquid-handling/pl...
[2] https://www.revvity.com/product/fontus-lh-standard-8-96-ruo-...
I've been interested in this kind of stuff watching it from afar and now I may need to buy / build a machine that does this kind of stuff for work.
When I demo'd my scope (which is similar to a 3d printer, using low-cost steppers and other hobbyist-grade components) the CEO gave me feedback which was very educational. They couldn't build a system that used my style of components because a failure due to a component would bring the whole system down and require an expensive service call (along with expensive downtime for the user). Instead, their mech engineer would select extremely high quality components that had a very low probability of failure to minimize service calls and other expensive outages.
Unfortunately, the cost curve for reliability not pretty, to reduce mechanical failures to close to zero costs close to infinity dollars.
One of the reasons Google's book scanning was so scalable was their choice to build fairly simple, cheap, easy to maintain machines, and then build a lot of them, and train the scanning individuals to work with those machines quirks. Just like their clusters, they tolerate a much higher failure rate and build all sorts of engineering solutions where other groups would just buy 1 expensive device with a service contract.
Maybe the next startup idea is biochemistry as a service, centralised to a large lab facility with hundreds of each device, maintained by a dedicated team of on-site professionals.
Could they not make the scope easily replaceable by the user and just supply a couple of spares?
Just thinking of how cars are complex machines but a huge variety of parts could be replaced by someone willing to spend a couple of hours learning how.
Regulator is not only there to protect the public, it also protects VC from responsibility
Regulations around clinical trials represent the floor of what's ethically permissible, not the ceiling. As in, these guidelines represent the absolute bare minimum required when performing drug trials to prevent gross ethical violations. Not sure what corners you think are ripe for cutting there.
Disagree. The US FDA especially is overcautious to the point of doing more harm than good - they'd rather ban hundreds of lifesaving drugs than allow one thalidomide to slip through.
But off-label use is legal, so it's ok to use a drug that's safe but not proven effective (to the FDA's high standards) for that ailment... but only if it's been proven effective for some other random ailment. That makes no sense.
> What's your level of exposure to the pharma industry?
Just an interested outsider who read e.g. the Omegaven story on https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab .
It is trained on human prose; human prose is primarily a representation of ideas; it synthesizes ideas.
There are very few uses for a machine to create ideas. We have a wealth of ideas and people enjoy coming up with ideas. It’s a solution built for a problem that does not exist.