We face two major threats today: one to the health of our planet and the other to our own. The U.N. says the global population will hit 9.7 billion by 2050, meaning more people consuming more natural resources than at any point in human history. Consumption is already doubling every 10-12 years. Add to that the challenges of a warming planet. On the human health front, some 30% of young people under age 20 are obese, 31% of deaths are from cardiovascular disease, and cancer cases are growing at a rate twice as fast as the population.
Fortunately, biology and technology are creating fixes for the planet as well as for the human body. As they do so, they are poised to reinvent countless industries, giving rise to what I believe is a golden age for biology as technology. As Arvind Gupta, the founder of health-science accelerator IndieBio, argued in one recent Medium post, “the twin catastrophes of planetary and human health” will create a $100 trillion opportunity.
Before I tell you how, here is an extremely brief history of the field. Biology, of course, is the original technology. Our tinkering with life’s building blocks, and our ancestor’s manipulation of plants and herbs as medicines and their use of neem branches as toothpaste or the cultivation of plants like corn has been going on for millennia. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that we saw the first flowering of today’s modern biotech industry.
In 1972, Robert A. Swanson helped launch the birth of biotech when he co-founded Genentech, which became a pioneer in the field of recombinant DNA technology. By creating novel DNA sequences in the lab, Genentech was able to synthesize human insulin for diabetics (1982), and create growth hormones for kids who suffered from a hormone deficiency (1985).
Among the other early leaders in the field was Applied Molecular Genetics (today known as Amgen). In 1989, it won approval for the first recombinant human erythropoietin drugs to treat anemia in people with chronic kidney failure, and later to treat anemia in HIV patients. Last year, the $23.75 billion company’s best-selling drugs were Neulasta, used to prevent infections in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, and Enbrel, to treat some autoimmune diseases.
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