Signal About nine in 10 clinical drug candidates fail, which the chapter partly attributes to computing error

Summary

The report opens its chapter on quantum simulation for drug discovery with the high failure rate of drug development. Roughly nine in ten drug candidates that enter clinical trials end up failing. The causes vary, but the report says they include errors in design and computation. For decades, predicting how thousands of atoms in a protein interact has required simplifications that tend to introduce such mistakes. The outlook argues that if simulation lowers this uncertainty, capital priced against the nine-in-ten failure rate could be reallocated. Diseases once screened out as too costly, including rare and orphan conditions, could then become more viable targets.