Short answer: Dov Gertz says the easiest gains are in discovery and preclinical work, which carry less regulation; he expects the roughly five-year clinical trial phase to remain, but better molecules and patient selection should raise trial success rates.
Watch this answer from Episode 32 (starts at 13:59) · Episode 32 notes and transcript
From Episode 32: From DNA to Drugs: How AI Is Rewriting Human Biology, starting at 13:59.
Jordan Metzner [13:58]: Dov, you mentioned earlier a little bit about kind of the shortening the timelines and, obviously, like, regulations specifically in The United States and the FDA is obviously, I guess, like, one barrier to shortening the timelines. Have you started to see the government start to pick up your tools or look at your tools, and, what kind of change do you think we'll see from, like, a regulatory perspective?
Dov Gertz [14:17]: So first of all, from a regulatory perspective, you could think of two areas. One is the area of discovery, which is kind of maybe the first five years, like target discovery, drug discovery, preclinical studies, whatnot, is is not where there's heavy regulation. Where the regulation starts is when you start clinical trials, and that you're talking at a bulk of about another five years, give or take, depending on the details. So the lowest hanging fruit in terms of shortening timelines is in discovery where the drugs are not treated on humans. So, therefore, there's much less regulatory burden. So that's where the lowest hanging fruit in terms of shortening timelines. I'm not even sure that in a decade from now, anything will change with clinical trials. I assume not. So I assume the five year bottleneck of clinical trials will remain for the foreseeable future once the model become extremely good at modeling human interactions with novel molecules, then perhaps the regulator will shorten that slightly, but that's very, very far from real from reality at the moment. Yeah.
Dov Gertz [15:21]: So that's kind of my two cents there.
Jordan Metzner [15:23]: Okay. So, I mean, I guess to synthesize that, you think, like, we'll see a lot more early stage drug discovery, but we're still gonna have to go through these clinical trials and still see it. So instead of a ten year time frame, we might start to see six year, seven year, eight year time frames for getting drugs from discovery out to market.
Dov Gertz [15:41]: Correct. That's in the foreseeable future. In the very long term future, then also, I think clinical trials will be shortened. But I think that, I predict that clinical trials will be more successful in terms of success rates because we're gonna get better molecules into clinical trials. And with products like ours, predict the patient response better and therefore choose the better population, and it's good for everyone. Like, fewer people are gonna get drugs that won't help them in clinical trials, and more people will get drugs that will help them. So even in the value of, like, folks getting drugs in that horrible time where they're just looking for a novel drug and they're, enrolled into a clinical trial, will hopefully, if the technology pans out as we all hope it will enjoy better success rates, for those novel drugs.
