# Personalized drugs could make treatment fit the patient

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/personalized-drugs-could-make-treatment-fit-the-patient/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Mark Cuban](https://realalpha.app/people/mark-cuban/) · Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur and Cost Plus Drugs executive. · Led Dallas Mavericks to 2011 NBA title; built Cost Plus Drugs, the transparent online pharmacy, and Broadcast.com.
- Host: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz · Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
- Show: a16z Podcast
- Episode: [Mark Cuban on Why AI Could Turn Solo Founders Into Trillionaires](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/), Oct 28, 2026
- Moment: 35:17 to 41:06 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/personalized-drugs-could-make-treatment-fit-the-patient/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2117

## Quote

> “the cost of designing a drug personalized to you after reviewing your DNA and knowing everything that it knows will **start approaching zero**”
> — [Mark Cuban](https://realalpha.app/people/mark-cuban/) at [35:34](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2134) · a16z Podcast

## Takeaways

1. AI may personalize over-the-counter drugs before other treatments.
2. Drug design costs could fall as models and algorithms improve.
3. Doctors will still add human judgment and interpret individual data.

## About this segment

Mark Cuban predicts AI could make drugs tailored to a person’s DNA far cheaper, starting with over-the-counter medicine. He expects doctors to remain essential, though their training and work may change.

From “Mark Cuban on Why AI Could Turn Solo Founders Into Trillionaires”, Oct 28, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[35:30](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2130) And so I say that to ask you, what do you think the ultimate impact of the Frontier Labs, you know, OpenAI and Theropic have very big ambitions in this space. Either them or others will be in reshaping health care or sort of, you know. I'll tell you exactly. I'll tell you exactly. And I'm selling my own book here a little bit. But the cost of designing a drug personalized to you after reviewing your DNA and knowing everything that it knows will start approaching zero as the capabilities of models go up, right?

[36:00](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2160) We talk about GPUs and how they'll get faster, the networks behind them, the power required. But it's the algorithms that are going to change everything and make them more efficient, right? And we don't even know what the speed of improvement are going to be on algorithms. But at some point in time, whether it's five years, 10 years, 20 years, they're going to take something from Eric, Julie, and Mark, and they're going to say starting with over-the-counter.

[36:21](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2181) Because if you think about it, right, you walk into a drugstore, you get this, you know, excuse me, whatever, Advil, Tylenol, right, ibuprofen, and we all think it's going to impact us the exact same way. And we have to experiment to see how it impacts our body. the body makes no sense whatsoever. And so as the processing power and the analytics power of these models from the frontier models gets better, they will be able to really truly personalize over-the-counter drugs without a lot of the mishigash you have to go through to try to figure these things out, right? And now all of a sudden, if here's my personal ibuprofen, here's my personal dose or mixture of whatever, these over-the-counter drugs, bam, you start to change it. Then you get into, you know, making other drugs that are personalized for you. Because

[37:13](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2233) again, the fact that we all take Eloquist and decide between Eloquist or Xarelto or Warfarin makes no sense whatsoever in the big scheme of things. And so being able to take those things and personalize that medicine. And what I have told two of the Frontier Models, I said, if you really want to be smart, you take your $20 or your $200 subscription and you include that service once it's available.

[37:39](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2259) Because your marginal cost for doing this at that point in time, look, the inference and everything that has to happen just to respond to a request today, expensive like this, right? Coming down very quickly, but the same thing is going to happen for this type of personalized medicine. Initially, it's going to be enormous, but as we understand the human body more and understand all the variables in our body more and our brains more, et cetera, and understand the medications and figure out how to do the end of one for everybody, it will be part of a normal subscription because there's no reason it should be.

[38:14](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2294) How expensive is 23andMe? You pay $99 or less now to get your DNA looked at. And so maybe I pay $99 up front. I give them my DNA if I'm willing to do that, you know, obviously for privacy concerns. They store it. They continue to bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You know, maybe you want to know what could be wrong. Maybe you don't want to know what could be wrong based off of your DNA. But if something does go wrong, they have access to all these drugs, all these opportunities, and the ability to create them in real time.

[38:45](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2325) And selling my book, we want our pods to be right there to be able to manufacture them because we're the only ones capable of doing it. And I don't see that changing for a long time. I think one of the things also, Mark, that people... probably don't appreciate as much as they should in that context is that as that happens, as what you just described happens, and as drugs become just better products for like every individual in the country or in the world, that is actually one of the most disruptive forces for care delivery, right? Like how much of healthcare is actually the job of the doctor helping patients figure out why a drug doesn't work for them and calibrating and doing med titration and changing behavior to make your your life work for the drug as opposed to the other way around and so um that's

[39:26](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2366) something that i think you know but remember because of that latency i mentioned earlier you're still gonna need doctors if mark walks into the hospital and i just tried this new personalized medicine and i just start puking my guts out yeah you still need you can have it on video right and you can have a robot there say how do you feel mark right and the terminator might walk in and say your time is up i don't know but but i'd rather have a human there with all five senses being able to take a look and ask questions and see the crying mom or the crying son or child or whatever and be able to include that in the context.

[39:56](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2396) And so I don't think ever that we'll replace doctors and we shouldn't even try because and you guys know how adoption of technology is, particularly for this. You still have to know the questions to ask. You still have to know what the variables are that matter versus the ones that don't. you still have to realize that even as processing costs drop towards zero, hopefully at some point in time, that, you know, there's still a cost associated with it, even if that cost is only time. And so, you know, you need somebody there who's been educated in all those pieces. I think to your point, Julie, where things might change dramatically when it comes to the role of the doctor is how they'll be trained in medical school. They won't be taught the exact same things. They'll have to learn how to use open evidence or whatever else is available out there

[40:45](https://realalpha.app/v/5UWDUD6qaM4/?t=2445) and how to extract information, even if it's just that DNA information and understanding what's in there and what the model thinks about it and being able to translate that to the person.