Dr. Emilia Javorsky

Well, that's simply not true in biology.

And it's infeasible, even using classical physics, never mind quantum physics, to simulate even like a week or a minute of a human's biology if you covered the entire Earth in GPUs.

So COVID is used as the sort of case study of how could we prevent or cure something.

And I think it's worth taking a step back and having the perspective that we've actually yet to cure any complex chronic disease in humans.

So we've done a really great job with infectious diseases, which are not actually targeting the human, it's targeting the bacteria or the virus.

And we're making a lot of progress with some genetic diseases where it's sort of a single bug in the code is causing the disease.

But diseases that are complex, we still have yet to cure one.

So never mind cancer, but pick anything, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease.

We have some ways to manage them, but we actually haven't cured them.

So the COVID example is not a great example for prevention and cure.

It's also not a great example of drug development in general.

So when we think about infectious disease, that is a very easy study to run a clinical trial on.

Because in order to determine whether something new, be it a vaccine or a drug, works, you have to figure out, does it actually work in people?

Right.

And so when you're dealing with something like COVID, from when you get exposed to when you show symptoms, you're talking about seven to 10 days.

Right.

That's very different than something like cancer or Alzheimer's disease, where these are processes that are really decades long from when they sort of start to finish in the disease.

And most of the trials in those domains, you really need to follow people for five or six years to actually understand, is this moving the needle in a significant way to solve this in patients?

And the third thing about COVID is that story of like, oh, well, we had COVID and science went and guns were blazing and we got there in less than a year.

ignores the fact that the science had already started 10 years earlier, right?