Biotech
Definition
Biotechnology covers a vast field of natural and applied sciences with the final aim to develop products and services involving organisms and cells. Examples for widely used biotech products are biopharmaceuticals such as vaccines, antibodies and hormones.
Since the begin of biotech’s commercialisation in the 1970s, the global biotech market experienced a gigantic growth. In 2021 biopharmaceuticals alone generated a total global revenue of US $343 billion (1) and the overall global biotech-market is estimated to be approx. 1 trillion in 2026 (2).
Several global developments indicate that the demand for biotech products and services will continuously grow and the biotech market could become a multi-trillion business soon. A growing number of countries face the problem of obesity, lack of physical activities, allergic diseases and population ageing which increasingly create the necessity for new medications and superior treatment methods.Due to globalisation, constantly growing tourism and increasing migration, it becameincreasingly difficult to contain the spread of infectious diseases totheir original locations. The Covid-19 pandemic is the best illustration of this problem. The accelerated global spread of infectious diseases is not limited exclusively to humans but includes food plants and farm animals as well. Spread of infectious animal/plant diseases, climate change and population growth increasingly threaten food security and resilience, too. Another related problem is the global spread of bacteria resistant to existing antibiotics which must be replaced in the very near future by a new generation of antibiotics.Undoubtedly, biotech will play a major role mitigating the aforementioned problems and create new business opportunities.
Innovation Fields
Global warming and soil degradation on the one hand, population growth on the other hand make it necessary to generate plants which are resilient to stress such as heat, infectious diseases and elevated levels of salt in soil.
Worldwide a large number of countries face the problem of population ageing. Ageing is one of the most relevant factors of developing cancer. Although there is a large number of pharmaceuticals to treat certain cancer types, there is a large number of other cancer types which are difficult to treat or impossible to cure. Currently there is a very mall number of approved gene-therapies to treat patients with genetic disorders. Collectively, existing gene-therapies suffer from low efficiency, very small target groups (orphan diseases) and extremely high costs ranging from approx. 0.1 to 4 million € per patient. Consequently, patients with widespread genetic disorders would benefit from new, fast, efficient and low cost gene-therapies. Gene-therapies can also be used to treat cancer because cancer patients have typically acquired genomic abnormalities similar to genetic disorders. Therefore, cancer patients would enormously benefit from such gene-therapies, too.
Due to population growth, more and more habitats of wild animals are occupied by humans. In addition, there is a constantly growing illegal market for wild animals as a meat source or as pets. These factors contribute strongly to the transmission of animal pathogens to humans (zoonosis). There are tens of thousands of potentially life-threatening animal pathogens (for example Ebola)andglobalisation, migration and tourism strongly facilitate their global spread. Zoonotic pathogens such as Covid-19 and HIV already caused gigantic problems to the global community. Another related grave problem is the spread of bacteria resistant to existing antibiotics and therefore, new antibiotics are desperately needed.
Chronic infections with HIV and Hepatitis B viruses for example can be treated with certain pharmaceuticals but not cured. Therefore, respective patients need life-long medication with sever side effects. Therefore, a new generation of pharmaceuticals has to be established to eradicate such chronic infections.
Ageing populations, chronic diseases and obesity strongly contribute to growing pool of patients with degenerated organs and tissues. Currently only a small number of rather simple organs and tissues can be bioengineered and transplanted to patients in need. The bioengineering of such transplants is very expensive and time consuming so therefore new methods and advanced technologies have to established to bioengineer complex organs and tissues.
Responsible Person: Cihan Makbul
1) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-022-01582-x
2) https://newmarketpitch.com/blogs/news/biotech-market-size