Biotechnology
What have been the most important innovations in biotechnology over the last quarter-century? If you ask 29 industry professionals, as I did for this report, there's no doubt you'll get Twenty nine completely different responses. The first thing that hit me about the responders was their optimism. Although it's appealing to present the views of this most professionals in terms of "boom" and "bust," most experts preferred to accentuate the beneficial. Among those who mentioned failures, virtually every one was certified with something along the lines of "but it may be too early to tell."
A positive outlook in biotech is nothing lacking fantastic given, as Andy Strayer, Pharm.D., vp for clinical procedures at PPD (www.ppdi.com), notes, just one single in ten biotech companies is profitable. But while the setbacks have been many and notable, the impression is that achievement far is more compelling than failure. Undoubtedly, 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 a wide selection of technologies that are gorgeous in concept, but worisome in their commercial conclusion. Remember antisense?
John Thompson, senior vp of corporate development at Invitrogen (www.invitrogen.com), explains the last Twenty five years in biotech as "a time of powerful development and unparalleled discovery," particularly in the significant knowledge 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 article on interferon caused Crawford Brown, Ph.D., CEO of Eden Biodesign (www.edenbiodesign.com), to change academic course from chemical engineering to microbiology. Over these Quarter of a century Dr. Brown notes that biotech's "sky-high" hopes to cure cancer (not to mention the well-known cold) are still difficult.
"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 pledges of stem cell research are most likely "false hopes," he anticipates that "real medical and economic benefits" will happen, but they could take quite a few years. Not every person 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 result on human medicine and decrease in suffering than recombinant DNA."
Goldberg comments that Geron (www.geron.com) will soon begin clinical trials of the first human embryonic stem cell therapy, in accordance with 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 touted 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 benefits. Mario Elhers, M.D., Ph.D., CMO at Pacific Biometrics (www. pacbio.com), weighed in with numerous 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.
