Ruxandra Teslo
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
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Where they publish
Newsletter Ruxandra's Substack Her newsletter on genomics, science policy and intellectual culture. Has a feed.
Recent
- Education as an AI safety area 18 Sept 2026 If we count on human judgement to guide AI, we need to maintain institutions that cultivate it.
- Curing cancer won’t redeem AI 1 Sept 2026 Fears around AI are about loss of human agency and purpose. Curing cancer won’t fix that.
- Intelligence is not the main bottleneck 21 Jul 2026 Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world
Show 17 more
- Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy 10 Jun 2026 Some of the most promising drugs are bottlenecked by a "boring" but incredibly important problem
- Considerations for egg freezing: a practical guide 12 Apr 2026 Some additional notes on practical steps towards egg freezing
- The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure 15 Mar 2026 How early-stage clinical trials became unnecessarily expensive and inefficient—and how we can fix them, inspired by a recent story about a dog treated for cancer.
- The Moral Crisis Behind the Billionaire Wealth Tax 11 Mar 2026 On wealth taxes, tech billionaires, and the moral vacuum of modern elites.
- Equality as a Consolation Prize 3 Mar 2026 In a secular world, equality is a last attempt to offer some dignity to the weak
- The 30-Year Success Story the US FDA Ignored 18 Feb 2026 And why there is hope this is changing now
- The FDA should not change its mind last minute 11 Feb 2026 In which I discuss the implications of the FDA's latest decision on Moderna's influenza vaccine
- Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap 6 Dec 2025 Discussions around the motherhood wage gap reveal the limits of autism and the benefits of female intuition
- What will it take for AI to change drug discovery? 9 Nov 2025 Some thoughts on avoiding self delusion.
- For clinical trial reform, we need more hobbits 18 Sept 2025 Or how hobbitian courage is important
- Some clarifications on Hepatitis B transmissibility 4 Sept 2025 In case people were feeling misled by how transmissible Hep B is, here is a clarification.
- Your newborn is not Hepatitis B vaccinated because of wokeness 1 Sept 2025 Being reflexively anti-system is bad
- My ovaries do not have cysts. 23 Aug 2025 On the unaptly called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
- A response to Kate Manne on pregnancy 29 Apr 2025 On the importance of well-reported data
- Autoimmune therapies: an inspiration for anti-aging therapies? 20 Apr 2025 On how anti-aging therapies could piggyback on autoimmune treatment strategies in the same way the latter piggybacked on advances in cancer therapies
- I got carried away and made a mistake 20 Apr 2025 In which I apologize to Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- Scott Alexander was right: doubling down 18 Apr 2025 In which I double down on my argument from "The edgelords were right: a response to Scott Alexander"
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 14 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Curing disease is not worth it if the price is the permanent deprecation of most human beings' existence.
As someone coming from a biology background, who considers “curing disease” as a very noble mission, I still believe that the vague promise of “curing disease” is fundamentally not worth it if it comes with a form of permanent deprecation of most humans’ existence.
Curing cancer won't redeem AI Said 1 Sept 2026
AI will not on its own compress decades of medical progress into a few years, because the binding constraint is human data, clinical trials and regulation rather than intelligence.
I told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
Drug companies pile onto the same few already-validated targets, so far less of biology gets explored than could be.
In biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
Show 11 more
The patent system rewards novel chemical matter and not novel biology, so nobody is paid for validating a new drug target.
The patent system then further disincentivizes companies from taking target risk, because it rewards novel chemical matter, not novel biology.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
A capability existing is not the same as a capability being absorbed: how fast a technology changes the world is not set by how fast the technology improves.
A capability existing is not the same as a capability being absorbed into institutions, and, perhaps most important of all, translated into outcomes people care about.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has fallen for decades: far more money spent per drug, with no matching improvement in the odds a candidate reaches the market.
Take Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
The hard part of drug discovery is knowing what to make - which target is worth drugging - not designing the molecule.
That is mostly in the realm of chemistry and is intrinsically far more tractable and predictable; given a validated target, good teams usually reach a decent molecule.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
Manufacturing and batch-release requirements, not biology, are what kill most promising cell and gene therapies.
Excessive manufacturing requirements are a pervasive problem, especially in the field of cell and gene therapy and they are killing countless of promising medicines before they ever reach patients.
Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy Said 10 Jun 2026
Investment will keep draining out of cell and gene therapy until manufacturing and regulatory risk become possible to underwrite.
Until manufacturing and regulatory risks become easier to underwrite, capital will keep drifting away from one of the most promising technologies of the last century.
Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy Said 10 Jun 2026
Better drug candidates do not shorten clinical trials, because a trial's duration is set by operational and regulatory friction rather than by how good the drug is.
Even if AI can help design more effective drugs, timelines will not compress until we solve the operational and regulatory bottlenecks of trials.
A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials Said 28 Feb 2026
A clinical trial is not only a test of a drug: early trials are experiments whose real product is the human biology data everything downstream is built on.
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials Said 28 Feb 2026
The human data an AI model would need to predict trial outcomes can only come from trials in people, so the loop runs no faster than the trials themselves.
But remember that such data can only come from trials in people (mice are nice, but most animal results simply do not translate.)
A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials Said 28 Feb 2026
How long a trial takes decides which diseases get drugs at all, because capital flows to the indications whose endpoints can be measured quickly.
Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.
A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials Said 28 Feb 2026
About ninety per cent of drugs that enter clinical trials fail.
The current success rate for a drug entering clinical trials is only about ten percent, meaning 90 percent of all drugs fail.
A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials Said 28 Feb 2026
Beliefs others hold too
AI will not on its own compress decades of medical progress into a few years, because the binding constraint is human data, clinical trials and regulation rather than intelligence. 2 hold this
I told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has fallen for decades: far more money spent per drug, with no matching improvement in the odds a candidate reaches the market. 2 hold this
Take Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
The hard part of drug discovery is knowing what to make - which target is worth drugging - not designing the molecule. 2 hold this
That is mostly in the realm of chemistry and is intrinsically far more tractable and predictable; given a validated target, good teams usually reach a decent molecule.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck Said 21 Jul 2026
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
18 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Curing disease is not worth it if the price is the permanent deprecation of most human beings' existence.Their words
As someone coming from a biology background, who considers “curing disease” as a very noble mission, I still believe that the vague promise of “curing disease” is fundamentally not worth it if it comes with a form of permanent deprecation of most humans’ existence.
21 July
From one piece Intelligence is not the main bottleneck 6 beliefs · writingruxandrabio.com
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Their words
That is mostly in the realm of chemistry and is intrinsically far more tractable and predictable; given a validated target, good teams usually reach a decent molecule.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
-
Their words
Take Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
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Their words
A capability existing is not the same as a capability being absorbed into institutions, and, perhaps most important of all, translated into outcomes people care about.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
+ 3 more
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Their words
The patent system then further disincentivizes companies from taking target risk, because it rewards novel chemical matter, not novel biology.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
-
korrents.com
Drug companies pile onto the same few already-validated targets, so far less of biology gets explored than could be.Their words
In biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
-
Their words
I told him what I believe: that in the age of AI, medicine will be bottlenecked more than ever by regulation and the grind of clinical trials, and that billions poured into faster pre-clinical research won’t touch that problem, unsexy as it is.
Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com
10 June
From one piece Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy 2 beliefs · writingruxandrabio.com
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Their words
Until manufacturing and regulatory risks become easier to underwrite, capital will keep drifting away from one of the most promising technologies of the last century.
-
korrents.com
Manufacturing and batch-release requirements, not biology, are what kill most promising cell and gene therapies.Their words
Excessive manufacturing requirements are a pervasive problem, especially in the field of cell and gene therapy and they are killing countless of promising medicines before they ever reach patients.
12 April
15 March
11 March
3 March
28 February
From one piece A response to Dario Amodei on AI & clinical trials 5 beliefs · writingruxandrabio.com
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Their words
The current success rate for a drug entering clinical trials is only about ten percent, meaning 90 percent of all drugs fail.
-
Their words
Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.
-
Their words
But remember that such data can only come from trials in people (mice are nice, but most animal results simply do not translate.)
+ 2 more
-
Their words
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
-
Their words
Even if AI can help design more effective drugs, timelines will not compress until we solve the operational and regulatory bottlenecks of trials.
18 February
11 February
6 December 2025
9 November 2025
18 September 2025
4 September 2025
1 September 2025
23 August 2025
29 April 2025
20 April 2025
18 April 2025
Nothing matches.
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