> "In drug development however, it takes a very long time to know that a candidate for a drug doesn’t work."<p>Mmmm, only somewhat. At the beginning there are million or billions of candidates. Most of them are easily rejected. It's only a few of the candidates which get far enough along to go into animal or even human testing which cost the big bucks.<p>> "Tests in a lab can be automated, are a lot cheaper and take much less time to execute."<p>As in, combinatorial chemistry? Big arrays of screening robots? DNA-encoded chemical libraries?<p>> "I claim that we should turn our efforts to: 1) Make the in Vitro testing phase a more profound step in the process and as a result:"<p>Yup, sounds like combinatorial chemistry.<p>> "2) Find more tests which together provide better predictability of: a. More potency, b. Less toxicity"<p>Says pretty much everyone, for decades. It's hard to go to a QSAR conference and <i>not</i> hear about someone trying to do this.<p>> "3) Enable each iteration to make a small change to the candidate and repeat the process."<p>Yes, this is called QSAR.<p>> "Nowadays, if a drug fails the clinical trials phase a biochemical engineer may try to slightly alter it — and repeat the entire drug development process from scratch."<p>Ummm, what? No. It more often goes back to an earlier stage. It doesn't restart "from scratch." If you've got a good lead compound, you're going to "make a small change to the candidate", not go back to, say, virtual screening of millions of compounds from chemical space.<p>I don't think this author knows much about how drug development is done. Why is this linked-to from HN?