| I'm a layperson, but there seem to be a few problems with this: 1. Mouse models are not perfect simulations of human biology 2. Cost as has been mentioned multiple times 3. Patient response to treatments depend not just on drug formulation, but also disease state and progression 4. Even mice likely have population dependent responses to drugs Given the above, a "combinatorial explosion" of drug cocktails tested on mice would likely only tell you what's safe for a given strain of mice, not what's safe for humans, much less what's effective. Factor in disease state, dosage, mouse model impedance, and the numerous other little things that go into using drugs to treat illnesses, and the "grad student brute force" approach begins to seem a lot more intelligent in comparison. Especially since some of those grad students are already using AI to reduce the search space of interesting drugs. EDIT - my wife (PharmD) adds that if you're targeting diseases with this approach and not just general safety, then a lot of diseases have no known cause, but they do have treatments. That means there's no good way to simulate this in mice because the cause is unknown. Diseases are being discovered every day for which there are no known causes. Furthermore mouse models require manual labor. No way to scale that up. |