Top Biotech Developments to Watch for

To open the study process to a much wider community of stakeholders, software resources that promote collaboration, data sharing, and interactive meetings allow groups to work together regardless of where they are located.

FREMONT, CA: Current biotechnology mainly focuses on medicine. Small start-ups are developing new treatment methods for rare and complex disorders and genetic testing to classify inherited diseases, global pharmaceutical firms, and government funding agencies in this area. Other fields of biotechnology include alternative energy, agriculture, and environmental science.

Top biotechnology developments include:

Increased Stakeholder Collaboration

The opportunity to facilitate cooperation among stakeholders representing numerous organizations, whether global corporations, smaller companies, academic institutions, or government research organizations, is another advantage of cloud computing. To open the study process to a much wider community of stakeholders, software resources that promote collaboration, data sharing, and interactive meetings allow groups to work together regardless of where they are located. 

Increased collaboration presents a potential threat to practitioners in biotechnology. For wider teams collaborating on projects, and with some projects taking several years to gain regulatory approval or produce a return on investment, with the technologies they are making, people and the organizations they serve need to consider intellectual property rights. Otherwise, the products they make could not benefit financially from them.

Growth in Personalized Diagnosis of Rare Diseases

From 2.7 billion dollars for the Human Genome Project in 1990 to less than 300 dollars currently, and possibly less than 100 dollars shortly, the decreased cost of genetic sequencing allows for far more rigorous screening and intervention targeting of study subjects. This has allowed customized therapy strategies and tailored therapies to be created, which are more successful than less precise treatments since they rely on the genetic and molecular composition of a patient.

The main area of focus for tailored treatments is cancer care. One famous example is blood cancer, such as leukemia, where a procedure called CAR T-cell therapy targets the immune cells of a patient, and the immune system can attack tumors.