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Comment by snowmaker | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for reading the Shasqi paper and for the detailed comment!

It seems if I can paraphrase your argument that it boils down to: "Just because your drug works in a mouse doesn't mean it will work in a human. So even if it works in a mouse there is still a lot of technical and scientific risk left."

I certainly agree with that. But I don't think it's incompatible with what I wrote in the blog post. The way the economics of the pharmaceutical industry work, it is still worth taking drugs into human trials even if the chances of them working are small.

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Wow thanks for going through my comment!

Definitely appreciate more people funding projects like this. Heck, hopefully I'll be applying with an idea like this in the future too!

My worry/question is, what steps are you taking to vet the eventual scientific feasibility of these ideas? My main thesis is that biotech ideas and projects are fundamentally different from tech in the sense that any prototype (less than a clinical trial) is not a real prototype so some method needs to exist to account for that in the evaluation.

I think you answered this very well yourself: "In biology its not at all a good assumption that if it makes sense in your head, then it will work in a human being, because no single person (not even a mythical House MD) has a full mental model of what we currently understand about all our biological systems."

We do our best to vet the eventual scientific feasibility of these ideas, but it's along the lines of "it makes sense in theory", not "it will definitely work".

Because, as you said, our understanding of biology is so incomplete, I think that is the best that is possible right now. But I think that's ok. We (as a society) should be pursuing all the ideas that make sense. Some will work out of the box, some will work with modifications, and some just won't work at all. But this is the only way I know to make progress.

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