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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> but this is the hands-down all-time champion example of accelerated drug development, and I know of nothing that even comes close.

For all the flack that Big Pharma gets, when we really needed them, they came through with vaccines and anti-virals.

Meanwhile, governments and government agencies largely covered themselves in shame and incompetence and poor communication.

I am happy that Big Pharma makes big profits that keep very smart people employed. Society is much better off with all those smart people working on drugs or Han if they were working on optimizing click through rates for ads.

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Since this seems to be generating some controversy (presumably because Big Pharma?) what alternative research and drug discovery, development, testing, and manufacturing ecosystem should we as a society strive for?

There are some interesting startups in the space, but mostly they seem to be focused on ML-driven lead generation. I’m optimistic, but not aware of a grand slam demonstration of success on this front. Honestly some of Derek’s discussion makes me hesitant; are the data one would need to assess things like oral availability and manufacturability available enough to make the current ML approaches viable for creating the finish line? How critical is the role of all this tacit knowledge?

Are there smaller more lab focused drug discovery outfits that would benefit from some policy change that gives unfair advantage to the BigCos with the scale advantage?

The regulatory overhead to getting a drug approved by the FDA is enormous and this places a huge burden on small companies. I have no magic ideas for fixing this but it's a classic problem of regulatory capture, in many other fields besides pharmaceuticals. I suspect there are ways that the government (and/or private funders) could effectively centralize just the testing and data collection, while keeping the R&D independent and flexible, but it would require a different mindset than we usually apply to public policy.

Everything in society that can be criticized, will be criticized by a subgroup. Even still, I don't think Big Pharma gets enough credit for the multiple vaccines and treatments developed over the last two years.

About 10 years ago my Mom got cancer, and she was treated with Rituximab. She's alive and well, and cancer free, today. She literally owes her life to Big Pharma. Rituximab came to market in 1998. It's quite likely that my Mom's disease would have been a death sentence in 1997.

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