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The 21st Century has seen technology contribute life-altering realities like getting from New York to Beijing in less than 14 hours or grandparents using Facetime to see their newly anointed “Princes” and “Princesses” of future generations. New technologies have not only democratized widespread access of information worldwide, it has created new ways of providing cheaper and better products to improve quality of life. Yet with all the advancements made, healthcare continues to operate through an outdated and archaic paradigm.
To be fair, a number of new discoveries have been made through technologies such as next-gen sequencing, high-throughput screening processes, and robotics — however they continue to be used on the same hypothesis-driven, chemical screening platform from 30 years ago. Why are we screening chemicals first and looking to biology last? Most drugs developed today are on the market for years before we can even fully grasp their impact or effect.
Simply put, we fail to engage the biology upfront in the process. Considering that on average it takes roughly $1.7 billion and 12-14 years to bring a single drug to market, this is a costly proposition. And our healthcare system is buckling under this burden.
The very nature of drug development today is based on chemical screening, but the body is primarily driven by biology. We have the means to enable cutting-edge technologies to create an elaborate and sophisticated cellular intelligence community.
This “back to biology”-approach can identify key biomarkers driving a disease microenvironment — and then create nonchemical treatments to normalize it. By listening to our own biology, our cells can take part in guiding the drug discovery process. The result? A system where the data generates the hypotheses, rather than the hypothesis blindly ‘seeing what sticks.’
Beyond looking to the data, we also need to go much deeper than our current system provides. Genomics has been heralded as the future for discovery, but on its own does not present the full picture of health and disease. We don’t put our roofs on a basement, so why would we truncate human biology to only one element in our cell’s metabolism? We need to enrich the data to include proteins, lipids, metabolites, RNA, and functional data to the point where we are represented by a deep understanding of our molecular profiles rather than a single gene mutation.
Technology is making it more possible than ever before to appreciate the whole story of the patient by capturing and analyzing every aspect of their cellular makeup. Removing bias through the use of mathematical algorithms and supercomputers will allow us to process this information — making it actionable data rather than just “big data.”
As an industry, we have to look inward and ask ourselves: can we do better? By going back to the biology and letting the data guide the discovery, progress is viable. Eliminating the need for chemical screening brings hope for cutting the time for drug development and cost for doing so in half. Additionally, using biology as the basis for drug compounds rather than chemicals means more holistic treatments with less side effects and comorbidities.
Eighteen percent of the US GDP is spent on healthcare and the current state of affairs has much room for improvement. Technology is creating a common sense approach to understanding human populations more effectively. Biology, coupled with computational power will create a powerful roadmap for our future.
Next generation medicine demands a new approach. The good news is that it is possible, the future is bright, and opportunities for tackling some of our most crippling diseases are directly in front of us. Steve Jobs once portended that the intersection of biology and technology will be the greatest discovery of our generation. The tools are all there. Now we just have to harness them to create the medicines of the future.
Niven R. Narain is the co-founder, President and Chief Technology Office of the biopharmaceutical company Berg.
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