Landscape #3: Creating Biological Systems
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By:
Alix Ventures: Supporting Early Stage Life Science Startups Engineering Biology to Drive Radical Advances in Human Health
Overview
The last two decades have brought about a revolution in the pharmaceutical industry that started with recombinant proteins, but has now expanded to antibody, cell, and gene therapies. This revolution stems from improved understanding of biology, which has allowed us to leverage known systems as platforms for the creation of new drugs. This has had tremendous advantages, as leveraging existing scaffolds and platforms means that we don’t need to recreate the wheel for every new therapeutic, and instead can focus on optimizing for a specific target and indication. However, this has also begun to result in limited differentiation between drugs, as many properties stem from innate biology rather than human engineering. This phenomenon has likely contributed in part to the rise in “me too” strategies and is particularly noticeable with cell and gene therapies. Despite the first approval for these classes of drugs occurring in the last 5 years, there are already over 1000 ongoing clinical trials, the majority of which are focused in a limited set of indications (mostly oncology and rare diseases).