Any subject matter experts care to chime in with your gut feeling about where this sits in the "promising potential treatment" to "AI psychosis" spectrum?
More like an automotive hobbyist who has enough of a machine shop in the garage to (barely) be able to do any of the engine work they need themself. Other hobbyists have this too, about half the equipment or less compared to an established hot-rod shop.
But this guy is designing and building his own radically different engine, optimized to be better performing than anything else out there no matter how big the established alternative teams, including multinationals. Nothing else even qualifies as a milestone in this garage.
People across-the-board give such minuscule credit to the way some individuals can accomplish what the biggest teams can't.
In this case one of the key elements is that the product needs to be more easily manufactured profitably and reliably" compared to potential competitive materials or it will not be more attractive to approve and deploy compared to what other choices there are.
Not only that but it needs to be more attractive financially, period, compared to all other drugs of any kind* considering costs of technical challenges, raw materials, energy, etc. Otherwise it is less likely to have a chance at enough backing to ascend from the benchtop to anybody's pharmacopoeia to begin with. At the Contract Drug Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) the factory productivity itself is the main feature, which makes the shareholders break out the Champagne when milligrams are the effective dose and it's cheap enough to make kilos, beyond a certain point.
One of the things about industrial processes is that it takes a team to carry out the operation, but often mainly only because it is operating at industrial scale. So that is taken for granted at the top of the mind always. In relation to that, people usually think that developing the process itself from "nothing to something" also requires a team of researchers and experimenters in about the same way, at laboratory scale. Because that's what usually happens and has been known to work as well as it has, which is pretty good. It just doesn't cover all the bases, plus over the decades most of the places where lab teams have overgrown it's from directors' firm grasp of how long it takes to reach any decent milestone at all. And their response too often has been to "speed things up" when resources allow by crowding the labs a bit in spite of how many mythical-man-months accrue over the decades :\ Herd mentality can trump individual greatness, and it can be a slippery slope.
Leaving better-than-ever greenfields for the ambitions individual, but it takes guts like few others.
Here, one of the pillars of manufacturing success, ease of production, is pushed to the far side of the long tail to be within reach of a single-handed operator. The easier the better for everybody, but this is a severe focus-inducing limitation to allow going without a team which could otherwise help build things that one person just can not do.
But sometimes there's no other choice if you're going to get something accomplished on your own using very limited resources anyway, and you want to start sooner rather that later.
If you can make a viable prototype in a garage it may very well be the kind that is more financially feasible to mass-produce compared to things that could never even get off the ground no matter how advanced the "conventional" team is with their orders-of-magnitude greater resources.
Ownership structure could make the difference too, as a blurb I'd say ask a few PhD medicinal chemists what they would do to own 100% of their own inventions ;)
And this garage is not ugly. If you've seen what's in back at a random FDA-approved manufacturing facility, that can be. Ug. Ly.
Garage did pretty good for a couple of notable companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple too :)
>Maybe he publishes and it goes somewhere, I have a feeling getting approval for trials will be challenging with his setup as it is now.
Yeah, drug development is one of those things where practically the only way to make it to production is to let a big incumbent with a big enough war chest to drag it across the finish line buy it.
If it isn't a potentially big money-maker said big incumbent won't touch it though. Will more likely try to shut it down especially if it overlaps with any of their more ludicrous offerings. And given the properties that this has (easy to manufacture, stable, soluble, low/no toxicity, etc) it's ripe for a shutdown because it'd make AD treatments far too cheap.
China could be a good start, and given his name there could be some family connection he'd be able to take advantage of. But even if he's successful there there's nothing to stop Big Pharma from lobbying so it's either expensive to import or banned in the US/West.
"Potentially promising but likely to fail to replicate in human/non-mouse trials" is the easy default for new drug announcements, it's the modal outcome for drugs in this level of development, we've cured mouse cancers dozens of times over the years after all. The guy seems to have relevant expertise in the field so less likely to be purely AI driven nonsense.
What does the guy's basement have to do with it? We live in the internet age, we can do anything anywhere. Was there not any other more relevant information to fluff up the headline? By the way, why are we still using twitter?
> All of the in vitro screening was performed by an OpenTrons OT-2 liquid-handling robot programmed by Claude Code. Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them
"Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them"
That does not seem to be an accurate description of what has happened here.
What it looks like is someone with significant biochemical experience and a Harvard PhD has created some kind of drug or chemical that he thinks will be effective for treating Alzheimer's, and that he mentions using Claude Code to help him program some of the complex chemical engineering machines that he used along the way.
Any subject matter experts care to chime in with your gut feeling about where this sits in the "promising potential treatment" to "AI psychosis" spectrum?
It's closer right now to interesting hobby project from a guy who's trained in chemistry, like a guy who's a mechanic keeping a project car.
Maybe he publishes and it goes somewhere, I have a feeling getting approval for trials will be challenging with his setup as it is now.
I do like the "do chemistry the old fashion way" ethos though. I wish he added a blurb about why he's doing it this way
More like an automotive hobbyist who has enough of a machine shop in the garage to (barely) be able to do any of the engine work they need themself. Other hobbyists have this too, about half the equipment or less compared to an established hot-rod shop.
But this guy is designing and building his own radically different engine, optimized to be better performing than anything else out there no matter how big the established alternative teams, including multinationals. Nothing else even qualifies as a milestone in this garage.
People across-the-board give such minuscule credit to the way some individuals can accomplish what the biggest teams can't.
In this case one of the key elements is that the product needs to be more easily manufactured profitably and reliably" compared to potential competitive materials or it will not be more attractive to approve and deploy compared to what other choices there are.
Not only that but it needs to be more attractive financially, period, compared to all other drugs of any kind* considering costs of technical challenges, raw materials, energy, etc. Otherwise it is less likely to have a chance at enough backing to ascend from the benchtop to anybody's pharmacopoeia to begin with. At the Contract Drug Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) the factory productivity itself is the main feature, which makes the shareholders break out the Champagne when milligrams are the effective dose and it's cheap enough to make kilos, beyond a certain point.
One of the things about industrial processes is that it takes a team to carry out the operation, but often mainly only because it is operating at industrial scale. So that is taken for granted at the top of the mind always. In relation to that, people usually think that developing the process itself from "nothing to something" also requires a team of researchers and experimenters in about the same way, at laboratory scale. Because that's what usually happens and has been known to work as well as it has, which is pretty good. It just doesn't cover all the bases, plus over the decades most of the places where lab teams have overgrown it's from directors' firm grasp of how long it takes to reach any decent milestone at all. And their response too often has been to "speed things up" when resources allow by crowding the labs a bit in spite of how many mythical-man-months accrue over the decades :\ Herd mentality can trump individual greatness, and it can be a slippery slope.
Leaving better-than-ever greenfields for the ambitions individual, but it takes guts like few others.
Here, one of the pillars of manufacturing success, ease of production, is pushed to the far side of the long tail to be within reach of a single-handed operator. The easier the better for everybody, but this is a severe focus-inducing limitation to allow going without a team which could otherwise help build things that one person just can not do.
But sometimes there's no other choice if you're going to get something accomplished on your own using very limited resources anyway, and you want to start sooner rather that later.
If you can make a viable prototype in a garage it may very well be the kind that is more financially feasible to mass-produce compared to things that could never even get off the ground no matter how advanced the "conventional" team is with their orders-of-magnitude greater resources.
Ownership structure could make the difference too, as a blurb I'd say ask a few PhD medicinal chemists what they would do to own 100% of their own inventions ;)
And this garage is not ugly. If you've seen what's in back at a random FDA-approved manufacturing facility, that can be. Ug. Ly.
Garage did pretty good for a couple of notable companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple too :)
>Maybe he publishes and it goes somewhere, I have a feeling getting approval for trials will be challenging with his setup as it is now.
Yeah, drug development is one of those things where practically the only way to make it to production is to let a big incumbent with a big enough war chest to drag it across the finish line buy it.
If it isn't a potentially big money-maker said big incumbent won't touch it though. Will more likely try to shut it down especially if it overlaps with any of their more ludicrous offerings. And given the properties that this has (easy to manufacture, stable, soluble, low/no toxicity, etc) it's ripe for a shutdown because it'd make AD treatments far too cheap.
Any reason he couldn't try advancing it somewhere like China or India, which (I assume) are less vulnerable to that kind of interference?
China could be a good start, and given his name there could be some family connection he'd be able to take advantage of. But even if he's successful there there's nothing to stop Big Pharma from lobbying so it's either expensive to import or banned in the US/West.
Big Pharma dynamics don't exist everywhere?
"Potentially promising but likely to fail to replicate in human/non-mouse trials" is the easy default for new drug announcements, it's the modal outcome for drugs in this level of development, we've cured mouse cancers dozens of times over the years after all. The guy seems to have relevant expertise in the field so less likely to be purely AI driven nonsense.
What does the guy's basement have to do with it? We live in the internet age, we can do anything anywhere. Was there not any other more relevant information to fluff up the headline? By the way, why are we still using twitter?
> What does the guy's basement have to do with it?
Nothing, because per the post he actually did it in his garage.
For those without Twitter accounts
https://xcancel.com/DouglasYaoDY/status/2070904914050797582
Guy says he created a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease. Huge difference.
> All of the in vitro screening was performed by an OpenTrons OT-2 liquid-handling robot programmed by Claude Code. Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them
Painfully editorialized headline.
He used AI to program robot arms.
"Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them"
Link to the overview which is similar to the Tweet text: https://pacepharmaceuticals.com/overview
That does not seem to be an accurate description of what has happened here.
What it looks like is someone with significant biochemical experience and a Harvard PhD has created some kind of drug or chemical that he thinks will be effective for treating Alzheimer's, and that he mentions using Claude Code to help him program some of the complex chemical engineering machines that he used along the way.
Shush, you'll pop the bubble
With help of AI, i developed a universal cure for all disease --- strychnine.
However, it does seem to have a few undesirable side effects.
How did LLMs not immediately shut down for “biosensitive” prompt or whatever bs they build into them nowadays?
That behavior was only observed with the short lived Fable preview, Opus and other models do not seem to pose such limitation.
They still have biology safeguards.
Can you provide an example or a reproducible way to trigger it?
Sibling comment by dr. mikelitoris would be a good way
I feel like if you asked it how to make nerve gas or something that would trigger it. But don’t do that.
Opus doesn't do that (at least it never has to me). I'm pretty sure codex doesn't either. It's just Fable
Because he only programmed robots to move A to B and didn't actually do any biology with AI
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