That's pretty much how small-molecule drug development works. They have huge high-throughput screening machines to churn through libraries of millions of chemicals, running assays to see whether they produce the desired results in vitro. Throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Once they get hits, they run more big assays, winnowing down likely tox issues or off-target effects, then try them in animal models, then eventually get to Phase I.

That's pretty much how drug development is done, especially at scale. You have robots running tests on hundreds/thousands of molecules in mini-tubes to check if anything has any kind of effect.

Isn't there a huge difference between in vivo and in vitro, though? If it's in vitro, you can actually physically check that it's working, and then rerun it to confirm. If it's in vivo and you're doing an RCT it's much more prone to statistical noise and the other issues, which is why it's bad to try things out randomly and see what sticks. At a test power of 0.05, one in twenty studies will stick due to chance.

It's a selection process. In vitro is for identifying candidates for pre-clinical tests, mostly.

that's the best method we have so far! really. I work in drug discovery.