Biotechnology
What have been the biggest breakthroughs in biotechnology over the last quarter-century? If you ask 29 industry experts, as I did for this report, there's no doubt you'll get 29 totally different answers. The first thing that struck me about the responders was their optimism. Although it's enticing to present the views of this many experts in terms of "boom" and "bust," most experts preferred to strengthen the beneficial. One of those who pointed out failures, virtually every one was licensed with something along the lines of "but it may be too soon to tell."
Optimism in biotech is certainly not short of extraordinary given, as Andy Strayer, Pharm.D., vp for clinical operations at PPD (www.ppdi.com), notes, just one in ten biotech companies is worthwhile. But while the setbacks have been many and prominent, the belief is that success far exceeds failure. Naturally, that generalization is actually difficult to prove. Biobusiness' boom and bust cycles more or less track parallel peaks and troughs for biology itself, which has created dozens of technologies that are gorgeous in concept, but aggravating in their commercial conclusion. Remember antisense?
John Thompson, senior vp of corporate development at Invitrogen (www.invitrogen.com), explains the last 25 years in biotech as "a time of strong expansion and unrivaled discovery," mainly in the key understanding of how life works through such agents as DNA, genes, proteins, and cells. The Scientific American special issue on biotechnology in 1980, and the March 1980 Time cover report on interferon caused Crawford Brown, Ph.D., CEO of Eden Biodesign (www.edenbiodesign.com), to change academic course from chemical engineering to microbiology. Throughout these Twenty-five years Dr. Brown notes that biotech's "sky-high" hopes to cure cancer (not forgetting the common cold) remain incredibly elusive.
"Even today, as noted in the joint Financial Times/Scientific American supplement on stem cells dispersed during the BIO meeting, that cycle of hype and hope remains." Although Dr. Brown believes that many of the promises of stem cell research are probably "false hopes," he anticipates that "real medical and economic benefits" will come, but they could take quite a few years. Not everyone is so negative. Michael Goldberg, general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures (Menlo Park, CA), quotes Nobel prizewinning Prof. Paul Berg (Stanford): "Human embryonic stem cells will have a greater impact on human medicine and lowering of suffering than recombinant DNA."
Goldberg comments that Geron (www.geron.com) will soon begin clinical trials of the first human embryonic stem cell treatment, based on the work of Hans Keirstead, Ph.D., a neurobiologist at the University of California (Irvine). Interleukin-2, which Fortune featured on its cover in 1985, was identified as "the next interferon" and a possible cancer cure but, reported by Goldberg, was "a giant bust." He believes that gene therapy may be heading down the same road of long-on-promise, short on results. Mario Elhers, M.D., Ph.D., CMO at Pacific Biometrics (www. pacbio.com), weighed in with a number of observations. What's in, he says, are pharmacogenomics, biomarkers, companion diagnostics, blockbuster protein drugs, theranostics, fully humanized monoclonal antibodies, RNAi, protein therapeutics, and structure-guided drug design. What's out: antisense, gene therapy, ex vivo cell therapies, cancer vaccines, high throughput screening against non-validated drug targets.
