The cover of Ernst & Young’s 2016 biotech report has a picture of a parachutist and the subtitle, “Returning to Earth.” According to EY, the biotech industry has experienced explosive growth over the past few years, but that appears to have slowed in 2015. On its own, a 13 percent increase in biotech revenue looks impressive – unless it’s compared to the 18 percent increase in 2014.
So let’s take a few moments to dissect the report. Are biotechs descending, and if so, can we expect a soft landing?
There’s actually a lot of good news in the EY report. In addition to the 13 percent increase in revenue:
Ginkgo Bioworks sits at the intersection of synthetic biology, software, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, making it one of the more intriguing startups in Boston. Now, a fresh round of $100 million in venture capital also makes it one of the area’s biggest technology bets.
Healthcare companies are paying attention to the microbiome, i.e. the world of microorganisms that inhabit the human body, with a new school of thought believing many conditions and diseases have a root cause in the gut bacteria in particular.
We identified 11 private companies working in the space, many of them leveraging sequencing and better understanding of bacterial communities to help promote wellness or create therapies for specific diseases and conditions, including cancer and inflammatory bowel syndrome. Here they are below, arranged in alphabetical order:
En una planta de casi 70.000 metros cuadrados en esta ciudad, las máquinas de Samsung resuenan día y noche para dar vida a un producto inusual para el mayor fabricante de teléfonos inteligentes del mundo: medicamentos contra el cáncer desarrollados por Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
Las enormes plantas de producción y laboratorios de investigación, que representan una inversión de US$2.740 millones realizada por Samsung Group en los últimos cuatro años, son el signo más visible de que el conglomerado surcoreano no quiere ser conocido solamente como uno de los principales fabricantes de electrónicos de consumo del mundo.
Call it a long, lucrative leash. In a deal announced today, NGM Biopharmaceuticals of South San Francisco, CA, has signed over 15 percent of its equity and potentially much of its preclinical work to Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK), but the arrangement also gives NGM an unusual amount of freedom.
For the millions of individuals who have undergone radiation treatments for cancer and other diseases, or for those who can no longer conceive, there is exciting news that may give new hope. Breakthrough research from the Weizmann Institute in Israel has, for the first time, succeeded in creating human ova (eggs) and sperm, the essence of human reproductive process, at their earliest stages in the lab. Dr. Jacob Hanna, together with his research student Leehee Weinberger, achieved a phenomenal feat in the world of cellular biology that could translate into baby-making in the petri dish in the not-so-distant future.
Ambitions for biologically sourced fuels bump up against the reality that making chemicals and fuels from organic material is still generally more expensive. One company is hoping to overcome that obstacle by tapping into the built-in way that plants make their own energy.
Last month in Silicon Valley, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed up in black gowns to receive the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a glitzy award put on by Internet billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg. They’d won for developing CRISPR-Cas9, a “powerful and general technology” for editing genomes that’s been hailed as a biotechnology breakthrough.
In any business, projects fail, but in biopharmaceuticals, the consequences of failure are especially damaging. Projects in the industry tend to be long and expensive—from clinical trials to regulatory approvals to commercial application. At any point in the process, obstacles can derail a project. Failure is most certainly an option, and for companies with many projects in the pipeline, failure is inevitable.
The biodesign innovation process has been developed to help medical technology innovators increase their likelihood of success in identifying important clinical needs, inventing new medical devices and instruments, and implementing these advances in patient care. This approach is described in detail in the book Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies.
This website is a companion to the text, designed to provide innovators with active web links to support the Getting Started sections at the end of each chapter, relevant content updates, short videos of experts in the field, and links to other useful resources as they apply the biodesign process to projects in industry or academia. Use the menu on the left to access these materials by chapter.
