The Accelerating Pace of Biotech Innovation

If you think about the progress that we've made over the last 20 years and you extrapolate that forward, it's just incredible. But I think extrapolating it forward isn't sufficient because the pace at which we're advancing is accelerating. So you have to take this, the second derivative action to think and that's really hard to imagine. But I think we'll be able to already starting to be able to manipulate genes. We understand the gen genetic basis of disease to intervene. We'll find ways to intervene safely. I mean, nobody intervenes now in like changing genomes, right? You could change the genome with CRISPR or you can do other things. There's still some safety concerns. Those are not adequately addressed yet. And then of course there are a lot of ethical concerns have as well. But over time we'll figure out how to do that safely and change a gene that gives you a predisposition to atherosclerosis or Alzheimer's or whatever to avoid those, minimize those. And so I think the combination of genetics and, you know, you can't figure all this out just by laboratory experiments. A lot of it has to be guided computationally. It's just, it's amazing. You know, understanding brain circuits, being able to intervene in, you know, psychiatric issues.

Depression or I think neurological diseases are a huge, huge, you know, area of opportunity. And also the aging population in the world are all areas that will need focus.

So if you, and if you think about now or we, you know, pretty confident we can tell you if you were to like we, you know, we take a blood sample today and tell you if you get Covid you are or you are not going to have a bad outcome. You know, if that were a simple diagnostic test that could be run by hospital lab rather than a really complicated test, that that would be huge. Right. Then you could do your clinical trials only in those people who are going to have bad outcomes. So you would save money because you're not treating a lot of people who don't need your treatment. I think it's highly ethical to do that because every drug has side effects and people aren't going to benefit or they don't need it, but you expose them to the side effects anyway. That's not really an ethical thing to.

Do just for the audience. That's a term called pharmacogenomics, trying to understand how your genetic makeup affects your response to drugs. Which is of course a super exciting area of research and one that involves lots of computation and lots of measurements and lots of analysis. The opportunities are immense.

So I think all that's going to change. So the one thing that could get in the way, not the one thing, but we have to keep funding the industry. Well, it has to keep providing return to investors, so they, you know, keep funding it. You know, I don't think this is a discussion on drug prices, but there are certain solutions to drug prices that would crush that. I mean, there are other solutions that wouldn't. So it's not an insoluble problem, but some of the knee jerk reactions, I think, would just crush it. So, you know, as long as we have the right social environment, I think, you know, the, you know, students who are now in school can expect to have longer, healthier lives than we have. And we already have longer healthier lives than my parents have.