[fabian2k]

The possible chemical space is incredibly vast. Even a large collections of potentially interesting molecules at hundreds of thousands or millions of molecules isn't even scratching the surface.

Going directly to mice is certainly problematic in an ethical terms, you're going to kill many millions of mice for something that has very low odds of succeeding.

Biological systems are noisy, the chance that one of your hits is just doing something funny, but not useful is very high. Going directly to mice is only making this worse, as that is a much more complex system as an assay that simply measures binding to a protein.

[dekhn]

it's kind of impressive how, even those chemical space is vast, humans discovered salicylic acid from willow bark is a successful painkiller without ever running clinical trials or searching 1060 space.

Or how many chemicals we have were originally derived from plants. I wonder how they're finding these molecules without searching 1060 space?