Biotechnology

Medicine has been the beneficiary of two radical developments over the past sixty years: the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1952 and the rise of information technologies in the 1960s. One would expect that the discovery of life’s code, combined with the power of computing, would have radically increased the quality and length of human life-spans. But life-spans aren’t getting longer as quickly as they used to, and in some places they’re even getting shorter. Worse, the number of new drugs introduced each year – especially important new drugs (which you can measure by FDA fast-tracking) – is surprisingly low and well below the quarter-century average. That’s not to say that biotechnology can’t progress quickly. Here are some concluded manifesto on biotech trend and guding investment strategy on the field:

  1. Biotechnology has already created one revolution. It can certainly create another. Less than twenty-five years after Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA, venture capitalist Robert Swanson and biochemist Herbert Boyer founded Genentech, which went on to synthesize insulin far faster and more cheaply than almost anyone believed possible. And in a great revolution in the FDA approval process in the 1980s following pressure from the AIDS lobby, the agency acted almost nimbly to approve a huge number of important new drugs for many maladies. But the revolution in innovation and regulatory efficiency has not been sustained.
  2. There are presently three major and related obstacles facing biotechnology (or biotechnology investment at any rate): lack of data, capital intensity, and a medieval approach to therapeutic discovery. The first major problem is that genetic sequencing, which provides us with the body of knowledge we require to create genomic therapies, is extremely slow, expensive, and inaccurate.
  3. Present methods of sequencing (which use fluorescence) can only sequence about 95% of larger genomes, take forever to do so, and cost a fortune. The second problem is capital intensity: it simply takes far too much time and money before a company has any real indication that a drug might work with animal/human trials fantastically expensive despite the help of computer modeling. The final problem is an extremely slow drug discovery process: fundamentally, discovery still proceeds by enlightened guesswork, rather than as a disciplined process – and there is no good way for investigators to share data. Biotechnology companies that can overcome these stumbling blocks will create enormous value for their investors and society.