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Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Wegrzyn, former founding director of ARPA-H, on why AI drug design hasn't yet sped up cures. The physical steps, transferring assays between labs and scaling up manufacturing, are no faster than before, which is what her company is trying to fix.
…science is vast for needed to repeat things just because of just the lack of understanding of what happened. Sometimes you don't ever find out what went wrong. It's disappointing the amount of discoveries that we probably just lose to some sort of procedural variation that we haven't picked up on.
So, some of this is about saving costs, and some of it is about accelerating the discovery process by pointing you in the right directions.
You talked about how AI is kind of transforming drug design. We think of that as top of the funnel. Now, you can test billions of designs in silico. Some subset of those you can actually test in the lab, but we haven't seen billions new clinical trials. It's because the rest of that pipeline is still bottlenecked. We're not transferring the assays between labs faster than we were before. We're not scaling up manufacturing faster than we did before or better and with more choices than we did before. And that's really this physical AI infrastructure that we're creating is intended to just kind of break open some of those bottlenecks so that we can do one-shot tech transfer of manufacturing to scale up quickly, which is important to get cures to patients faster, candidly.
Now, I could see some people looking at your data capture process as a kind of surveillance within labs. Do you get that pushback that scientists who don't want to be watched?
Yes, we get that a lot. And I think it's something that my co-founder and I care really deeply about: we're doing this for the scientists. We want scientists to be top of license. If a scientist is successful, like we all win, right? Humanity wins if science is successful. And so, how can we…
The bottleneck that you refer to makes me wonder, think about like science being less rigorous than maybe we've always been led to believe. I mean, I know there's been rising skepticism in certain places, including within the Trump White House, about assertions of expertise and even published…