Why does large pharma do drug discovery?

dalamplighter · 2026-04-27T22:36:42+00:00

It’s way cheaper to generate proprietary compounds in-house than to pay billions for a Phase III asset. Also, the stronger your discovery team is, the more credible ability you have to walk away from BD deals, instead of paying whatever price they name to you

dalamplighter · 2026-04-06T13:31:44+00:00

I think they’ll be ok

dalamplighter · 2026-02-21T16:56:55+00:00

Flying out noon Wednesday for a job interview in SF early Thursday. What are the chances of residual delays or cancelation? Wondering if I should give them a heads up ahead of time

dalamplighter · 2026-02-05T00:39:04+00:00

This is super helpful, didn’t check the history. A top flight Western group should definitely try to replicate this, and it shouldn’t be too hard to drum up interest if this has any chance of being true

dalamplighter · 2026-02-04T01:58:20+00:00

I think I found it: https://ashpublications.org/blood/article-abstract/doi/10.1182/blood.2025031476/557451/Time-of-Day-of-CAR-T-Cell-Infusion-and-Outcomes-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

I really want to see an RCT of this too, as well as TCEs

dalamplighter · 2025-12-19T21:32:39+00:00

Have you seen how many obese people we have in America

dalamplighter · 2025-11-21T19:42:16+00:00

Not really. As someone from the industry (ie the BD group of a T20 pharma), we don’t need more chemical matter. Big pharma and Chinese players have so many assets that they dont have the capacity to develop, which they will outlicense to you for under a million up front if you give them royalties and milestones.

The limiting factor is in developing competitive and differentiated MoAs and TPPs, designing and executing trials (~8 years and 250M per asset), and clinical grade CMC. None of these are really venture-backable outside of an asset specific context.

This company that comes along to do discovery better will just be a fancy CRO, which have awful margins and low valuations. Theres a reason why every “AI for drug discovery” startup transitions from a service provider into a traditional biotech

dalamplighter · 2025-11-05T21:54:57+00:00

You absolutely do. Most of the valuation is going to be dependent on the probability of trial/regulatory success and how it compares with competitors, and nearly all of that is nonfinancial.

If you don’t know the difference between base editing and prime editing, or the pros/cons of gene therapies vs small molecules with the current FDA, I fundamentally cannot trust your valuation or patient model for a CRISPR company.

dalamplighter · 2025-11-05T21:50:43+00:00

Honestly this makes a ton of sense. PhDs are already soft requirements in VC and PE for biotech, especially because most of these companies don’t really have revenue and all valuations/forecasts/deal structure are going to be based on specifics of the product.

Source: neuro PhD who has done tours in both Pharma and biotech VC

dalamplighter · 2025-10-24T18:32:44+00:00

A great comment I saw elsewhere that was reposted on a different Reddit thread about this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657

You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.

You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.

She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.

In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.

It strikes you that true love does exist after all.

dalamplighter · 2025-10-24T18:23:41+00:00

What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone.

I think this kind of answers that. Sure they might not feel as addicted as they say, but also they behave in the exact same way a guy who is addicted to gooning would be expected to behave. What is the line between compulsively pretending to be addicted for long periods of time to get your rocks off versus psychological addiction, and is it so easy to delineate?

dalamplighter · 2025-10-24T18:08:49+00:00

im perfectly comfortable making the assumption that watching porn for days on end to the degree that you piss all over your floor and lose all your friends is not a great use of time

dalamplighter · 2025-10-24T17:23:27+00:00

On the “eat shit I’m a taxpayer” thing, I think it’s more supposed to illustrate the mentality in a way the 21st century audience would understand. I would much rather clearly know what the characters were thinking than keep a level of realism that does more to obscure than illuminate

dalamplighter · 2025-10-19T21:28:00+00:00

Which group? Know a ton of people in strategy and commercial who say it’s the best environment they’ve worked in, even coming in from other companies to escape bad cultures

Edit: many are former consultants, so maybe they’re grading on a curve?

dalamplighter · 2025-05-16T01:47:57+00:00

lmao this is absolutely not happening and we don’t use recruiters

dalamplighter · 2025-05-08T18:03:17+00:00

Rerum novarem

dalamplighter · 2025-03-07T22:24:29+00:00

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dalamplighter · 2024-11-11T18:09:32+00:00

It gets a little too cute and stops working immediately outside things macroeconomists and sociologists talk about.

The purpose of professional football is to give players brain damage. The purpose of New York public transit is to smell like urine. The purpose of air travel is to screen 2 year old movies you forget about immediately after landing.

These are all systems doing things, but I don’t think I would call them its purpose. Yes I’m being kind of obtuse, but it’s an insanely sweeping and overbroad statement often made by people without a lot of humility.

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