25 Aug 2026
Signal Headquarters
Vol. I
No. 241

Drug development costs are rising exponentially—the inverse of compute's Moore's Law cost curve.

The case

The bottleneck to making biology more like software engineering is the availability of the right engineering primitives (e.g., durable execution), not model architecture or biological insight.

“I actually think that's a lot of the bi the bottleneck to making biology more like engineering is just like having the right engineering primitives.”
Matt McPartlon · 11 Aug 2026

Pharma drug development costs are increasing exponentially, the inverse of Moore's Law in compute.

“More Moore's law backwards. So, it's like in like compute, you know, it's kind of scales so you have like this nice exponential scaling log line scaling of compute near the exact opposite in pharma. So, like the cost of actually making a drug in pharma is kind of like increasing exponentially.”
Neil Patil · 11 Aug 2026

Topics

Drug Development CostsMoore'S LawPharmaceutical R&D

Signal Headquarters · compiled from attributed public discussion. Last updated 2026-08-11.