Pharma Biotech Expo 2022

Biotechnology in Drug Discovery and Development

The Pharma industry is still assimilating the late 1990s wave of drug discovery technologies that are bringing about a powerful convergence of molecular biology, miniaturization, and materials and information technologies. Computer and chip technologies have given thousands of scientists the human genome as a bench tool, an opportunity unthinkable just 10 years ago. Scientists already have a publicly available catalog of 1.8 million single nucleotide polymorphisms to work with, and geometric expansion of proteomics research and technologies will create multiples of the existing data volume. The convergence of information technology and biology may well be the biggest story in biotechnology over the next decade. As we learn more about the cascades of reactions essential to disease and health, in silico modeling and testing will become more refined, perhaps alleviating some of the bottlenecks characteristic of wet biology.