Re:Anthropic IPO
by HDThoreaun on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:28AM
(#50468987)
I think this is a bit misleading. Less than 10% of phase 1 trials end up passing phase 3 and going to market. You can claim that means the challenge is verifying how well they work since you need to run a bunch of phase 3 trials but I think the real challenge is finding a phase 1 target that will end up passing phase 3. Doing a better job of quickly eliminating bad targets is the real challenge. If AI turns that 10% number into 20% then you can get twice as many marketable drugs for the same number of trials. I guess another way of putting it is that finding stuff that has a small chance of working is not a challenge, but finding stuff that has a good chance of working is a huge challenge.
That verification might start in some simulated computer environment but needs to move into physical wet lab, animal testing and then human testing.
So medicine is quite a bit different than code/math where you have a perfectly verifiable problem space that can be iterated within by AI infinitely.
A good example might be Alzheimer's where the brain plaque was thought to be a cause, lots of research on various ways to prevent or reduce the plaque and then it turns out that doesn't matter at all, or is more a byproduct than a cause of the disease.
edit: In general we have many diseases we don't understand and drugs that work via mechanisms we don't understand. So it seems very hard to have a computer simulation in which AI can test medicine. The simulator work seems like the actual problem to solve, not the invention portion.