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Rohit Krishnan's avatar

> All of this stuff is way harder than it sounds, because semaglutide and liraglutide are large fatty acids that can’t be crystallized. I think the best analogy would be designing a magnetic pool toy that’s designed to connect to two other separate, magnetic pool toys simultaneously, but all of the pool toys are transparent and slippery, and the only way you have of connecting them is by stirring a bathtub with a spoon. You can see how questions like, “How do I make these pool toys connect better?” or even “How can I tell if they’re connecting?” get really, really difficult.

Loved this, and excellent essay.

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Peter C's avatar

Why do some people respond to certain drugs but not others? Frequently the answer is “nobody knows, let’s try a different treatment.” I suspect this usually means there’s at least one hidden variable or mechanism nobody has discovered yet, let alone measured…

In your ping pong ball example: imagine we recorded a bunch of height/distance data but without being aware of concepts like drag, temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, the coriolis effect, etc. My layman’s intuition is that this is our current state of pharmacokinetics — we don’t have a complete model but we also don’t even know what data we need to build one, and this a complicated system with hundreds or thousands of things going on and millions of variables. Which ones are important? It’s hard to say what approach would be best for tackling this

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