Drug development

And there's plenty of new, you know, completely new developments and newly generated molecules all the time.

Um, and, and a large part of the conversation right now in drug development is around AI.

Of course, you know, AI is, is generating new, you know, compounds and potential compounds at a much faster rate than, than humans ever could.

Um, but I think a lot of times what, what is lacking is that, that human ingenuity to say, well, wait a minute, this combination of things, you know, which has never been done before should behave in a certain way.

I agree with you.

Let's make some small changes that over time result in a big difference for people.

In our case, like I said, we didn't really set out to necessarily be in the nutritional supplement industry, but what we found is we can create products that are helpful to people and have helped thousands of people at this point, But it also, interestingly enough, you know, drug development is very much a, it's a binary bet.

It's a very, it's very much a zero sum game.

The problem is that when you are talking about the gene AI, which is doing all these generated novel molecules or accelerated preclinical testing.

The preclinical toxicologic testing is still a tiny slice of the multibillion-dollar decade-long drug development pipeline, but it's also a big bottleneck.

And this is where we have a problem that even if you generate a lot of targets, 27%, 25% compared to previous because of the JNAI, those targets still has to get validated through the toxicology part, which is really a question of the amount of demand versus supply.

So what we are looking at is a significant growth in terms of demand.

Welcome to the Psychedelic News Feed, a podcast from Psychedelic Alpha.

Each episode brings you up to speed with the latest across psychedelic drug development, policy, and access from around the world.

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These are intended to be concise summaries as opposed to deep dives.

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Welcome to our first episode of the Psychedelic News Feed podcast.

Each episode will cover the preceding two weeks, for now at least, of updates from psychedelic drug development, policy, research, and access.

So this first episode covers September 7th through 20th, 2026.

So, you know, I'm actually hopeful that we still have a few more warnings yet where we can still see that AIs trying to misbehave, but we should not count on that lasting forever.

I just, as we're talking, I see this headline, Anthropic Building Biology Lab to Push AI into Drug Development, which, you know, maybe a few weeks ago would have sounded really great and promising and now sounds a little scary.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, a lot of people say, well, how is the AI going to affect the real world, like if it's just stuck in the digital world? And for a long time I've been saying, you know, there's a ton of possibilities.

Key takeaways, AI in pain medicine isn't science fiction.

It's already improving trial design, diagnosis, drug development, opioid safety, and administrative workflows.

Neuromoduling is where the nearest term most patient-facing gains are likely.

Closed-loop adaptive devices personalized to each patient.

And as we get those kinds of insights, then we can say, what if we could turn that into a medicine, have a medicine that blocks GPR 75, have medicine that blocks side B so everybody else can get the same benefits that those rare individuals that got it from lock up the genetic drawer again.

So, um, What insight can you give us into the internal rubric that you're using to decide if a genetic signal is strong enough to greenlight something toward drug development for Regeneron's portfolio?

Okay.

So look, it's a very funny question.

We're back on the BioCentury show.

I'm Tierney Baum, biopharma analyst here at BioCentury, and I'm here with Gonzalo Abacasis, vice president at the Regeneron Genetic Center.

Before we turn to computation at RGC, I wanted to ask, in your opinion, or what's your sense of How many genetic signals does the RGC generate in a year that make it towards drug development? And what do you think the reason is most of the time that they don't?

Oh, so I guess, you know, every year we probably have... about it, a dozen new signals that progress into our pipeline.

And that's often the key target.

But the question is, which enzyme do you want to target? And how do you target only that enzyme specifically without having the side effects of targeting other very good enzymes that might be doing a very good job? And then, in fact, that's why drug development takes such a long time, because one has to understand all the side effects of if you might have identified the target, which is what we've done here now is the first step.

And the second step is then to build a drug that then can target those.

The good thing about this approach though, so you mentioned going to your physician and having yourself checked for, in this case, prostate cancer, which is very common amongst men in South Africa, is that You know, often the recognition that there's a problem and understanding how one would go about solving that problem are two very distinct sets of observations.

Well, I would love to think that, but I'm sure that there are lots of contenders for this kind of accolade.

But...

But yeah, to answer your question very, very quickly, the whole process of drug development for any drug takes not less than about seven or so years, because the big part of the drug development is not the discovery that we've done now, it's actually the testing, the trials and all that, which one has to go through to understand.

side effects and all of those kinds of things.

Right.

And finally, we mapped out the brutal billion dollar architecture of modern drug development, where a statistical necessity and patent law collide with aggressive marketing strategies.

So the major takeaway from this chapter for you guys listening is that psychopharmacology is never just about what a molecule does to a receptor.

No, not at all.