Elliot, great piece! Would love to hear to your thoughts on the clinical trial bottleneck and potential solutions/companies that are tackling this massive problem. I really think solving the clinical trial problem will allow for a complete realignment of the pharmaceutical/biotech industry around transformational therapies, preventative medicine, and a focus on the health afflictions of the many not just the rare diseases of the few (still important).
During the last biotech boom in the 2000s I read where a consortium (or was it just Germany?) we're essentially building a human body with software that could simulate how novel drugs would interact and thereby sidestep some of the "clinical bottleneck". I haven't really heard much about it since--Im sure it was way to complex to tackle 20 years ago, probably even today, but is anyone working along these lines?
Elliot, great piece! Would love to hear to your thoughts on the clinical trial bottleneck and potential solutions/companies that are tackling this massive problem. I really think solving the clinical trial problem will allow for a complete realignment of the pharmaceutical/biotech industry around transformational therapies, preventative medicine, and a focus on the health afflictions of the many not just the rare diseases of the few (still important).
Thanks, Nikhil. I couldn't have asked for better timing for this question! I hope you enjoy my new essay on Vial:
https://centuryofbio.com/p/vial
This is an incredibly important area, and likely won't be the last post I write about it.
During the last biotech boom in the 2000s I read where a consortium (or was it just Germany?) we're essentially building a human body with software that could simulate how novel drugs would interact and thereby sidestep some of the "clinical bottleneck". I haven't really heard much about it since--Im sure it was way to complex to tackle 20 years ago, probably even today, but is anyone working along these lines?
Unlearn.ai is tackling a part of of this problem by creating digital twins for use as the control arm of studies.
And it looks like they can bypass a generalized physiology and go straight to twins for individuals, wow!