throwitaway6512's comments

For all of these “this is a simulated face”-claims I wish they would show the 2-3 most similar faces in their training set. For all you know, it could just be spitting out a random training image. How would you know the difference?

Computing capabilities inside this field. You can throw as much cpu time as you want at a bad model and it won’t mean anything. The value here is that it’s not just bruteforcing every concievable compound but instead goes through a sequence of potentially synthesisable drugs which are interesting according to docking simulations.

They could likely simulate tons more, but there is no guarentee that they are; Actually synthesizable, actually hit the target, aren’t toxic.

So at some point the current computing capabilites fall shot. But not because we can’t throw more cpu hours at the problem, simply because we don’t have the computational tools to cross those bery important barriers available at all.

The problem this solves is to shine a light on the inverse price wars going on in drug pricing. List prices increase dramatically while rebates are offers to lower the net price. Pharmacy benefits managers who do the negotiation like this because they earn money on the rebates(which are also shared with insurance companies) and insurance likes this because copay is a fixed rate on list price and not net price. And both of these actors who cooperate to increase list prices get to blame the increases on drug producers who year after year earn less per sold product because of the rebates.

This will however not solve anything only make it visible. Copay should be changed to work on net price after rebates, and some serius investigation of the middlemen needs to be instigated.

Having a goal of “as much money as possible“ is very different from the VC fueled goal of Billion dollars or bust. Trying to draw parallels between everyone who starts a company and the select few who aim specifically to become astronauts is like comparing attempts at moonshot companies with everyone who “wants to do something in stem”

I mean it is achievable. Why would it not be? If you tried to become an astronaut and failed you might write an article titled: “how I failed to become an astronaut”. And why not? Is it not achievable?

25$ at Walmart. I don’t get how people disregard this all the time. I don’t know if any other companies are selling affordable insulin directly to consumers but Novo IS doing just that.

90% of diabetics are insured. If we stop selling to insurance and try to sell directly to these patients we would end up being more expensive than competitors and lose those customers. I mean you could argue that if they are paying their own insurence they could cancel and perhaps have a net saving on the insulin, but that seem very risky considering potential comorbidities of diabetes, and you’d lose all other coverage.

Read up on the matter. The culprits are pharmacy benefits managers who push producers to increase list prices while demanding obscene rebates that are never passed on to the consumers. Most producers don’t disclaim the rebates, but Lars Fruegaard (Novos CEO) is on record saying that it increased from 64% to 67% last year. So pharmacy benefits managers are pushing up the list price but less and less is getting through to the producers. The American system is rigged by the middlemen who approach consumers with ownership of “cheap drugs” because of the rebates, while they approach the producers with ownership of the consumers. As an alternative to that system Novo Nordisk is releasing cheaper insulin through a partnership with Walmart where it goes directly to the consumers.

Openness around rebates will be a great first step to help lower prices, but the PBMs have gotten the industry into a reverse price war where everyone is overbidding each other on price in order to provide the larges rebate to PBMs. Something big has to change to revert that cause.

Disclaimer: I work for Novo Nordisk.