AFAIK pharmaceutical research is kind of at an impasse because virtually all the small molecules that are easily delivered and have any chance to do anything have been tested and are either found useful or not.
I don’t know anything about pharma research or chemistry, but this smelled off. Asking a bunch of LLMs (o3, 2.5 Pro, 3.7 ET, Grok 3, r1), none of them agree (o3: “no—we are nowhere close… this confuses confuses a genuine slowdown in R&D productivity (Eroom’s law) with chemical or biological exhaustion”, 2.5 Pro: “largely inaccurate and overly pessimistic”, 3.7 ET: “deeply misleading. It fundamentally misunderstands both the state of pharmaceutical research and the nature of small molecule discovery”, etc).
I am no expert but this was pretty much what I heard over and over when working in contact with pharma people around e.g. cheminformatics ML workshops and such. I think it’s well possible that this was meant as shorthand for a more complex “of course there are still tons of molecules that however aren’t even worth the effort of trying to synthesise and test, but all the small (< 100 atoms) candidates that even make sense to try have been explored to death” statement. Like, obviously you can do a bunch of weird small metallorganics I guess but if your reasonable assumption is that all of them are simply going to wreck someone’s kidneys and/or liver that’s not worth pursuing.
Then of course there’s regulatory and research costs, and part of the problem can be simply a classic “Hubbert peak” situation where really it’s the diminishing returns on mining further the configuration space of those molecules that make it impractical.
I don’t know anything about pharma research or chemistry, but this smelled off. Asking a bunch of LLMs (o3, 2.5 Pro, 3.7 ET, Grok 3, r1), none of them agree (o3: “no—we are nowhere close… this confuses confuses a genuine slowdown in R&D productivity (Eroom’s law) with chemical or biological exhaustion”, 2.5 Pro: “largely inaccurate and overly pessimistic”, 3.7 ET: “deeply misleading. It fundamentally misunderstands both the state of pharmaceutical research and the nature of small molecule discovery”, etc).
Maybe you meant something more nuanced?
I am no expert but this was pretty much what I heard over and over when working in contact with pharma people around e.g. cheminformatics ML workshops and such. I think it’s well possible that this was meant as shorthand for a more complex “of course there are still tons of molecules that however aren’t even worth the effort of trying to synthesise and test, but all the small (< 100 atoms) candidates that even make sense to try have been explored to death” statement. Like, obviously you can do a bunch of weird small metallorganics I guess but if your reasonable assumption is that all of them are simply going to wreck someone’s kidneys and/or liver that’s not worth pursuing.
Then of course there’s regulatory and research costs, and part of the problem can be simply a classic “Hubbert peak” situation where really it’s the diminishing returns on mining further the configuration space of those molecules that make it impractical.
That’s unexpected and interesting, thanks.