I though Alphabet would monetize only from selling tech and algorithms. But I admired Deepmind’s application. Better tech means lower drug price, I hoped 🤞 https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2021/11/04/isomorphic-labs-is-alphabets-play-in-ai-drug-discovery/amp/
If anyone can solve the pharma industry it’s google
Let's see how it plays out, that space is a very complicated and correctly folding proteins is just a small part of the puzzle. I'm betting this is going to be more chemistry focused, like e.g. Shrodinger, and less biology focused, like e.g. insitro/recursion/gingko
If they focus on chemistry it will be pre-clinical which is almost irrelevant to actual drug discovery since it is the cheapest and easiest part of the process. Sure, you could have better and more efficient Computational processes there and be effective and amazing, but it won’t move the needle until you crack the clinical bit which is The Valley of death in drug discovery. Preclinical is just not impressive.
This is just by judging from the tweet/blog announcement in which they mention hiring chemists and ML but weirdly do not mention biologists. There is good value in designing new chemical matter and doing better medicinal chemistry but it would indeed fall short if they don't have a good assay/model downstream.
Anybody who knows a shit about bio knows this is going to be a long hard process. There’s many “health tech” products google attempted that failed, tech companies understaimaging the challenge of healthcare
I don’t disagree the ‘hard’ part. But don’t assume that only those who have the tribal knowledge and capital can break into healthcare. Amazon wasn’t a full on retail company, Apple wasn’t a phone company, Netflix wasn’t a media company.
None of those things are as regulated as healthcare/Pharma.
How successful Google will be only time will tell? However, pharma can do with some shake up.
Free COVID vaccine is not good for you guys? Pfizer would have been bigger than all FAANG combined if it didn’t have humanity or be greedy like using personal data
Don't be fool, your tax paid for your "free" vaccine, which is $19.5 per dose for the first wave. Then Pfizer rise the price to $24 in June
25$ for life/freedom is too low
Oh, that’s why I get bombarded by deepmind recruiters everyday…. In my dream.
Don't worry: like many other projects Alphabet will cancel this in a year or two.
Demis will keep it running a bit longer, but ultimately if they don’t generate their own data they won’t make money In Pharma. No simulators for drug discovery, it’s not alphago
Alpha fold basically showed that transformers were able to develop a function that does SAR I think chemistry as a service is going to become a fairly important and significant emerging business model. My reason for this belief is because whilst everybody is focusing on energy and CO2, the reality is that climatic systems are changing and irreversibly so. It's just prudent to plan for climate adaptation. Climate adaptation is a trillion dollar material science problem. We need alternatives to food, fiber, novel housing materials tonne of stuff which all in its core needs new chemistry. Our ability to rapidly handle this change and adapt requires a tremendous focus on computational chemistry. So I see huge merits in this approach but for alternative reasons. Would love to see how this space pans out
Drugs are cheap everywhere else in the world with reasonable healthcare systems.
The US funds most of the R&D for drugs
If by most you mean a little over 50% that's right (USD 50 billion out of USD 92 billion total). If scaled by GDP, the US comes in 6th. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/research-and-development-in-the-pharmaceutical-sector_5jrrv1n9b1vc.pdf?itemId=%2Fcontent%2Fcomponent%2Fhealth_glance-2015-70-en&mimeType=pdf