But the space of possible vaccines is very large, I assume. So even with a ton of human testing that only takes three weeks, maybe this still doesn’t help much?
In principle, with enough resources, multiple vaccines could be tested this way in parallel. Not that there are that many vaccine candidates to try, as far as I know; but if there were some software that bulk-generated candidate molecules, it could be done, in principle. The limiting input is mobilized resources, not time.
Yeah, if you could reduce the space of possible vaccines to a smaller set of plausible ones, that certainly makes sense.
This makes me wonder, why not just let people volunteer to test risky treatments in general? Because there’d be bad actors who try weird shit willy nilly and misrepresent it to people as more plausible than it really is, such that the harm done to people outweighs the advancements in knowledge? But what if you remove the profit motive and only give this power to government researchers? Would they have too many career-y incentives to be too aggressive?
Human trials are much more expensive then trials in mice. If you can already rule out a drug by giving it to mice you save a lot of money that you don’t have to invest into your trial with humans.
Speed is not an important variable for government researchers outside of a situation like this where you need a fast response to a pandemic.
Speed matters a bit more for big pharma where it matters if you have one additional year of patent protection for your drug if you develop a year faster but even there the cost tradeoffs are in favor of doing animal testing.
But the space of possible vaccines is very large, I assume. So even with a ton of human testing that only takes three weeks, maybe this still doesn’t help much?
In principle, with enough resources, multiple vaccines could be tested this way in parallel. Not that there are that many vaccine candidates to try, as far as I know; but if there were some software that bulk-generated candidate molecules, it could be done, in principle. The limiting input is mobilized resources, not time.
We have the genome of the virus. All the surface proteins of the virus are candidate molecules.
Yeah, if you could reduce the space of possible vaccines to a smaller set of plausible ones, that certainly makes sense.
This makes me wonder, why not just let people volunteer to test risky treatments in general? Because there’d be bad actors who try weird shit willy nilly and misrepresent it to people as more plausible than it really is, such that the harm done to people outweighs the advancements in knowledge? But what if you remove the profit motive and only give this power to government researchers? Would they have too many career-y incentives to be too aggressive?
Human trials are much more expensive then trials in mice. If you can already rule out a drug by giving it to mice you save a lot of money that you don’t have to invest into your trial with humans.
True. The downside would be that animal testing is slower, which is I think why jimrandomh was proposing human testing.
Speed is not an important variable for government researchers outside of a situation like this where you need a fast response to a pandemic.
Speed matters a bit more for big pharma where it matters if you have one additional year of patent protection for your drug if you develop a year faster but even there the cost tradeoffs are in favor of doing animal testing.