[corporateguy6]

I personally think that machine learning will have a broad effect on the legitimacy of the pharmaceutical industries and health care in general. Once real data about all of these drugs, treatments, and expensive procedures finally starts being collected and exposed, the public will see things as they are, a farce.

[jcranmer]

If the pharmaceutical industry were willing to fake efficacy results, surely they could do better than having over ½ their drugs fail Phase III efficacy trials. Especially since one thing everyone agrees on is that the best way to lower drug costs is to figure out which drugs are going to fail Phase III much, much earlier.

[thwy12321]

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20080227/antidepres...

[viraptor]

> real data about ... collected and exposed

Which is not a machine learning issue. Just collecting the information is a costly / time consuming issue which can't be outsourced to servers.

[corporateguy6]

Right but the current innovation with regards to ml for medicine will force more data to be collected.

[viraptor]

We have lots of ways to process and learn from data already. ML may make some things easier, but we're ready to learn more things right now with existing tools. Getting the data is the problem.

[dnautics]

The amount of data you would require to do proper machine learning using current gradient descent techniques are orders of magnitude greater than that done in a drug study.

[sanxiyn]

For drugs, we already do postmarketing surveillance. Whatever you think of pharmas, drugs are not a farce.