Reading
References, further reading, and people working on the India clinical validation thesis.
On the clinical validation bottleneck
- Ruxandra Teslo, AI Won’t Automatically Accelerate Clinical Trials — Asimov Press, 2026. The clearest articulation of why better drug candidates alone won’t speed up clinical development. A direct response to Dario Amodei.
- Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace — 2024. The optimistic case for AI compressing 100 years of biology into 10. Critically, Amodei himself identifies clinical trials as the binding constraint that even powerful AI can’t easily route around.
- Jack Scannell et al., Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency — Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 2012. The paper that coined Eroom’s Law: drug development costs double every nine years despite exponential improvements in underlying technology. The original diagnosis of the problem.
- Ruxandra Teslo & Jack Scannell, To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials — Macro Science, 2025. The case that the answer isn’t fewer trials with better drugs but more trials, faster and cheaper.
- Saloni Dattani, Ruxandra Teslo, Adam Kroetsch et al., The Clinical Trials Abundance Blog — ongoing. Ideas and commentary on making clinical trials more efficient.
On India as an R&D base
- Owl Posting, How do you make a 250x better vaccine at 1/10 the cost? Develop it in India. — 2025. Two-hour interview with Soham Sankaran of PopVax on why India has all the ingredients for original biotech research but almost none of it happens, and what it takes to change that.
- India is the pharmacy of the world. But we are losing the drug development race — Indian Express, March 2026. On the paradox of India’s dominance in generics alongside its near-absence in new drug development.
- Akash Kulgod, The first 10 trillion dollar “company” will be an Indian Healthcare Alliance — 2025.
People and orgs
- PopVax — mRNA vaccine R&D, Hyderabad.
- Dognosis — canine-AI cancer detection from breath, Bangalore.
- 1Day Sooner — clinical trial reform advocacy.
- Renaissance Philanthropy — clinical trial abundance fellowships. Soham Sankaran is also a fellow here.
Know something that should be on this page? Get in touch at healthacc at proton dot me.