Interesting conclusions about drug discovery. Barabasi, as always, involved in complexity networks phenomena:

The Clinical Trials Puzzle: How Network Effects Limit Drug Discovery
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10709v1

[...] We find that convention dominates over innovation, as over 96% of the recorded trials focus on previously tested drug targets, and the tested drugs target only 12% of the human interactome. If current patterns persist, it would take 170 years to target all druggable proteins. We uncover two network-based fundamental mechanisms that currently limit target discovery: preferential attachment, leading to the repeated exploration of previously targeted proteins; and local network effects, limiting exploration to proteins interacting with highly explored proteins.

#information_networks #complexity #barabasi #drug_discovery #search_strategy