It took Eddy and his team roughly two months to construct the virtual trial, but once they hit Return, the program completed the study in just one hour. When he got the results, Eddy sent them to the ADA. He also mailed a copy to the Cards investigators. Months later, when the official results were made public, it became clear that Eddy had come remarkably close to predicting exactly how everything would turn out. Of the four principal findings of the study, Archimedes had predicted two exactly right, a third within the margin of error, and the fourth just below that. Rather than seven years, Eddy’s experiment had taken just a couple of months. And the whole project had cost just a few hundred thousand dollars, which Eddy estimates to be a 200th of the cost of the real trial. The results seemed to vindicate his vision for the future of medicine: faster, cheaper, broader clinical trials — all happening inside a machine.

via Modeling Human Drug Trials — Without the Human | Magazine.