Please Talk To Me About Pharmaceutical Infrastructure

If you talk to any biotech VC, it’s impossible to walk even five feet without hitting a new “AI for Drug Discovery” startup.

This isn’t a bad thing; it’s actually awesome.

We need more people working on how to use AI to make the world a genuinely better place.

However, good intentions don’t always translate (pun intended) into good outcomes.

Even if we suddenly had a breakthrough that enabled 10,000 new AI-generated therapeutic leads to be created, there’s still many barriers that face bringing these medicines to real patients.

I feel that there’s been a lack of attention given to the crucial infrastructure, whether development, clinical trials or manufacturing, that’s necessary to effectively enable the coming tsunami of AI-generated therapeutics.

This is true not just for pharmaceuticals either: second-order effects from important new technologies such as AI are underrated no matter what your field is, but I feel this is especially important given how much good it could result in.

Thus, to start off my Roots of Progress writing fellowship, I’m setting a goal of meeting with at least 10 people before the end of September who either work or have worked at a CRO (Human or Veterinarian), CDMO, CMO or other related organization to learn about your processes, tacit knowledge/common misconceptions outsiders have, pain points, future directions and more.

While I could read papers, textbooks or case studies online, my intuition tells me that the best way to get a useful perspective into this area is to talk to the people who are doing it every day.

If you know someone who would be interested, or are interested in this yourself, please contact me at [email protected].