[rjdagost]

I have worked in both semiconductor manufacturing and drug discovery industries. Reliably and profitably producing 5 nm chips is an extreme engineering challenge, but- it is an engineering challenge. Drug discovery is a question of science and requires a fundamentally different mindset that semiconductor manufacturing. Human biology is much more complicated than manufacturing chips (and that is extremely complicated); drug discovery is about "unknown unknowns". Discovering a drug that has the intended effects without causing terrible adverse effects is something that some of the best-funded companies on the planet struggle with.

[guelo]

Some of the best-funded companies on the planet also struggle to produce 5nm chips.

[thomastjeffery]

But this isn't about drugs. This is about editing genes to manufacture T cells. That's a lot more like engineering than drug trials.

[chris_va]

I've done some engineering and drug development...

Image trying to write code where you can't actually see what you wrote, where each time you compile it costs $1000 and the binary randomly is corrupted 50% of the time. And the only way to find out is to push it to prod and wait a few months for someone to call you. And every prod setup is subtly different without any documentation. That's about 100x easier than drug development.

:)

[nitwit005]

The nature of cutting edge stuff, regardless of the field, is that the process barely works, and costs a lot.

[kelnos]

Not in medicine, but I don't think that's true. It's very hard to understand what all the consequences are going to be when you manufacture those T cells, and you also have to figure out what to manufacture in the first place, based on experimental trial and error.

[lost_tourist]

Drugs ultimately have to be converted from the lab to mass production. How is it any different, they all require research, iteration, and ultimately (hopefully) engineered mass production?