Big Pharma Fails 50% of the Time in Phase Three. AI Can Fix That | Vin Singh, BullFrog AI
It costs up to $2 billion and fifteen years to develop a drug, and big pharma still fails half the time at the final stage. BullFrog AI founder, Chairman, and CEO Vin Singh joins Craig Smith with a clear diagnosis of why: the industry keeps picking the wrong drug target from the beginning, and no amount of downstream optimization fixes a fundamentally wrong starting point. Built on AI technology originally developed at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab, BullFrog has assembled a three-stage platform that cleans messy clinical data, runs causal analysis to map disease pathways, and then ranks competing drug targets using a competitive framework that removes the subjectivity most pharmaceutical decision-making still relies on. The most striking results in this conversation come from two case studies: work with the Lieber Institute for Brain Development - analyzing thousands of post-mortem brains - that led to the identification of potential driver genes for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia in months from data that researchers had spent fifteen years studying, and a pancreatic cancer trial where BullFrog's platform identified a patient subgroup with survival rates three times higher than the study average. Vin also delivers a candid assessment of the broader AI-pharma landscape: more than 90% of AI deals in the space are missing their milestones, most companies are wrapping open-source tools rather than building genuine technology, and the shakeout between players and pretenders is already well underway. Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.