The Hidden Cost of the Wrong Wet-Lab Decision
It's not just the direct bench cost. It's the compounding opportunity cost of scientist-months spent on a target that was never going to validate.
Notes on AI target discovery, multi-omics analysis, and the decisions that shape early-stage drug programs.
The standard workflow for generating a target shortlist is broken in ways most research teams don't notice until they're deep into a failed program.
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It's not just the direct bench cost. It's the compounding opportunity cost of scientist-months spent on a target that was never going to validate.
When genomics and proteomics data point in different directions, the answer isn't always to trust the GWAS hit.
We've seen several ways AI target ranking fails. Most come back to the same root issue: garbage-in garbage-out dressed in a confidence score.
Neither transcriptomics nor phenomics alone tells the full story. The value is in how they constrain each other.
The analysis you can re-run six months later with the same results is the analysis you can defend in a go/no-go meeting.
Confidence scores are only as useful as the evidence hierarchy that generates them. Here's how to interpret ours.
The right target for a $5M runway team looks different from the right target for a 40-person group. Budget constraints are evidence too.
A manual PubMed review catches nuance an automated system misses. But the automated system reads 40 million records before lunch.
The drug discovery community has near-consensus: genetic evidence is the strongest prior for target validity. We agree, with one important caveat.
High-throughput protein interaction data is extremely useful for target scoring, and extremely biased toward proteins the community has studied most.
Most downstream analysis errors are locked in before the model sees the first row of data. The preprocessing step is where target discovery quietly fails.
An experienced computational biologist spends months on a target ID problem, cross-referencing signals, weighting evidence, following up contradictions.