A Real 3D Drug-Discovery Funnel
This is a full three-dimensional rendering of the caloric-restriction (CR) mimetic drug discovery pipeline: the raw compound library and its four checkpoints — screening, model-organism validation, lead optimization, and the clinical pathway — sit at distinct points in 3D space, connected by a single continuous path you can freely orbit and zoom around.
- Individually tracked particles: each glowing molecule is assigned its own random rank at creation and travels the same funnel geometry every other candidate does, but only a shrinking fraction survives each checkpoint — exactly the same cumulative survival numbers used by the 2D version's readout panel, decomposed into per-checkpoint conditional pass rates.
- Attrition you can see happen: a particle that fails to clear a checkpoint fades to grey mid-flight and stops advancing, instead of disappearing between screens.
- Live pipeline metrics: Attrition Estimate, Validation Confidence and Time to Clinic recompute from the Pipeline Stage and Candidate Compounds sliders using the same formulas as the 2D simulator.
Caloric restriction reliably extends lifespan in many model organisms by acting on nutrient-sensing pathways such as AMPK, mTOR and the sirtuins; a CR mimetic aims to trigger the same biology pharmacologically, without requiring sustained restriction. Very few of the thousands of compounds that enter a screening library ever reach a clinic — this funnel is a rough order-of-magnitude sketch of why.