What are the most trending biotech related topics? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Praveen Tipirneni, CEO of Morphic Therapeutic Inc., on Quora:
It can be hard to pin down definite megatrends in biotech, partly because progress can come from very unexpected places.
For example, I remember helping my sister with her sixth grade science fair project in the mid-80s, entitled “Recombinant DNA and Advent of Gene Therapy.” After some setbacks a decade later, gene therapy research came to a halt. But 33 years after my sister’s science fair project, gene therapy is in the midst of a huge resurgence.
Technological progress isn’t linear.
We’ve recently seen other dramatic examples that would have read like science fiction just a few years ago, including the approval of a product to treat a rare childhood blindness.
While some aspects of biotech are too difficult to call trends, there are four definite areas worth watching in the coming year.
1. Consumers As Customers
The drug industry has gone through two eras so far: The era when doctors were the target customers, to the most recent era when payers (insurance companies) were the target. We’re now about to enter the third era—the consumer era.
There are several forces driving this trend.
More people are paying attention to the drug industry due to the rise in increasingly individual medicines. Let’s call it the “identifiable patient” phenomenon. A single child in trouble captivates the entire nation.
Think of “Baby Jessica.” There is an outpouring of sympathy caused by the emotional nature an individual’s often heartbreaking story. Yet getting support for thousands of people suffering from an earthquake doesn’t get nearly the same response.
In the drug industry, that response and personalized attention can work its way down to a single patient. Even now, some cancer treatments use drugs that are specifically made for one patient. And media coverage is honing in on these stories.
The popular press also reported extensively this year on a 7-year-old boy with junctional epidermolysis bullosa—a devastating whole body blistering skin disease. After a bacterial illness caused him to lose two-thirds of his skin, a specialized gene therapy was used to grow compatible skin. This transformational story had “Baby Jessica” type impact. And we’re likely to see these biotech miracles accelerate.
As drugs get more personalized—and stories about curing a child with a burdensome illness proliferate—it is capturing imaginations and piquing people’s interest in the sector.
That type of individualized treatment is going to continue gathering steam in the coming years as “identifiable patients” are cured by the latest therapies. We will have more opportunities to create individual treatments as we gain a greater understanding of the human genome and our own biology.
2. Silicon Biology
All technologies and products evolve back and forth from a vertical, integrated structure to a horizontal, modularized structure.
The current biotech pharma environment is highly integrated, although parts are increasingly modular. But you don’t see any component firms (technology suppliers) with nearly the market power as integrated pharma and biotech companies.
Eventually, organizational and technological forces push toward a horizontal and modular structure due to niche competitors attacking discrete industry segments. It’s difficult to stay ahead of competition across all the required technological dimensions and organizational inflexibility.
There is an inevitable march—though a slow march—toward modularization. While biology is currently thought of as too complex for silicon-type modeling, think of pattern recognition in driverless cars. Putting an automotive robot into a real world environment requires enormous complexity. Yet mass amounts of data combined with exponential increases in computational power have enabled these vehicles to hit the ground running.
We will continue to see increasing sophisticated specialty component suppliers such as Schrodinger in computational chemistry. Ramy Farid, the CEO of Schrodinger, says the exponential increases in computational power made huge breakthroughs possible. Just like driverless cars, fusing computation—with immense data generated by Morphic Therapeutic’s unique structural biology capabilities—has enabled the company to hit the accelerator.
3. Recruitment Demands For Specialized Skill Sets
Due to rapid development in biotech, the demand for talented individuals is high. It’s going to continue to grow in 2018.
The interesting part of the recruitment boom is on the supply side. We used to be constrained by the supply side of the equation, but the supply of talent is growing steadily. People are now willing to leave established companies for new ventures that look promising. This means more fluidity than ever before between small biotech companies and big pharmaceutical companies.
But we’re at a moment of increasing innovation and company creation, so the demand for talent is much higher than we’ve seen before. For the first time, recruitment will not be taxed by lack of supply, but by the immense demand from new company formation.
The battle for talent will be undoubtedly continue to increase.
4. An Epidemic In Medicine
William Osler is called the “father of modern medicine.” He once said, “If you know syphilis, you know all of medicine.” This was from an era before STD treatment. The complications of untreated syphilis are literally the textbook of medicine.
The modern version of that quote is: “If you understand diabetes, you understand all of medicine.” Diabetes, even more so than syphilis, is universally damaging. It is associated with universal pathology, including the kidneys, skin, immune system, heart, eyes, lungs—everything.
And unfortunately, the number of people with diabetes and complications from diabetes continues to grow. Obesity rates are rising. This is where the bulk of healthcare dollars will go.
Take just one complication: liver fibrosis, which is directly related to mortality. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, an earlier stage of morbidity, is estimated to affect 25% of the adults in the United States at a cost of a $100 billion dollars.
Of course, we all know that the least expensive answer would be for people to eat well and exercise. But that’s not the world we live in. While we’re applauding the individual patient cures, let’s not forget the earthquakes that kill tens of thousands.
Like all trends, forecasts can change. Progress isn’t always linear, but there’s much to pay attention to in 2018. There’s a lot to be excited about.
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