Nov 21, 2016 |
The end of biotechnology as we know it
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(Nanowerk News) If there were no biotechnology, the world would stand still. "Biotechnologically derived drugs dominate therapy with eight of the top ten best-selling drugs are produced using biotech methods," says Prof. Nigel Titchener-Hooker from the University College London.
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The European Union is funding research projects in bio-economy with 3.8 Bio Euro in the Horizon2020 program. Additionally, 3.7 Bio Euro are mobilized to drive the biobased value chain through funding public-private-partnerships within the European Bioconsortium between 2014 and 2020, states Dirk Carrez, director of the European Bioconsortium.
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Based on huge funding and investments, the world of biotechnology moves quickly forward. New technologies help the industry saving production costs and shorten development times. Using ultra scale-down technologies like tangential flow microfiltration and tangential flow chromatography, process times could be decreased from five hours to minutes. Perfusion systems reduce costs of goods for about 20 % compared to traditional (but still more stable) fed-batch systems, so Hooker-Titchener who believes that personalized medicine will be available by 2025 despite problems with clinical studies and approvals.
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As most highly valuable therapeutics are manufactured using CHO cells (Chinese hamster ovary cells), improving these systems is a top priority of the pharmaceutical industry. According to Helene Faustrup Kildegaard from Novo Nordisk, traditional technologies like random integration, down-regulation using RNAs, or knockout via mutagenesis are currently replaced by the CRISPR/CAS approach that helps shorten the cell line development from one year to three months.
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"We need more than CRISPR like genome stability or an optimization of genome editing," says Faustrup Kildegaard.
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Rainer Schneider, a key researcher of the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology, presented more solutions in another way. He talked about his in-vivo evolution and selection system for E. coli with an "extremely large mutation spectrum" that allows selection overnight with only variants with god stability surviving. Scheider pointed out that even a microbial antibody production would be possible.
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However, severe challenges are appearing on the scientific horizon. Prof. Huimin Zhao from the University of Illinois showed a fully automatized and dehumanized laboratory where a robot is transferring probes from one machine to the other.
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"In the future, we will see fast, automated systems for a fast discovery of new products from known or new sequence information. We want to move quickly from a sequence to a product," says Zhao.
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Thinking one step further, smart computers will analyze upcoming (big) data and define new work for robots that perform all experiments. As high-performance computers are yet able to assess scientific publications -- IBM-Watson already saved and evaluated millions of papers as general manager Davin Kenny mentioned in Fortune Magazine recently - maybe there won't be much room left for scientists in future.
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