everyday, I wake up, open the window, take a deep breath, and yell out:
‘protein binder generation models dont actually matter all that much, bc optimizing binding is one of the easiest and least costly steps in the drug design process’
it has become in vogue to say ‘protein binder generation models dont actually matter all that much, bc optimizing binding is one of the easiest and least costly steps in the drug design process’
but the argument against that (which i increasingly believe!) is that drug development is bottlenecked not necessarily by money — money is actually very abundant — but rather by the total ‘surface area’ of drug development that big pharma perceives is promising enough to help push along. this is correlated with money! but it is not money. it is actually attention
binders-on-demand may dramatically increase that surface area — via the instant transmutation of uncertain biology into experimentally tractable biology — in weird ways that are very hard to foresee