Tag Archives: agriculture

No, CRISPR-Cas won’t save the day for ag biotech

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You want to know how to drive a scientist crazy? Insist that you believe something that’s not supported by current scientific evidence. Tell her vaccines cause autism, or creationism is just as valid a theory as evolution, or that climate change isn’t really happening, I mean, after all, a monster blizzard hit Washington DC this January! Global warming, pssh…

There’s an old episode of Friends that did a good job of showing how this kind of conversation goes. Phoebe professes not to believe in evolution and Ross, a paleontologist, keeps trying to convince her that evolution is real using scientific evidence and logic. He grows increasingly frustrated and insistent as she continues to deny the basis of his life’s work, finally losing it when she goads him into admitting (like a good scientist) that even theories like evolution are not immune from questioning and testing.

We train scientists to carefully generate, weigh and use evidence. To no one’s surprise, this leads many scientists to generalize and think that in all matters having to do with the physical world we all should and of course will follow the evidence. Yes, sometimes that leads to unpopular ideas, and sometimes the ideas change as the weight of evidence changes. This training can make scientists kind of boring at cocktail parties. Still, the overall scientific process keeps moving forward and it’s because of this reliance on evidence.

But many people (including, at times, even some scientists) don’t always think the same way about things in the physical world. And that’s why I’m pessimistic that CRISPR-Cas technology will peacefully resolve the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) debate. Continue reading →

The Innovator’s Dilemma in biopharma part 2. Where are the markets for disruptive tech?

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All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

h/t to @Frank_S_David, @scientre, and the LinkedIn Group Big Ideas in Pharma Innovation and R&D Productivity for links and ideas

Biopharma may be ripe for disruptive innovation to come in and overturn their markets but that doesn’t mean it will happen. There are constraints beyond those of pure business, including the simple fact that treating diseases is really difficult and we don’t know as much as we would like about how biology really works. I see today’s biopharma market as a victim of its own success. The 80s and 90s saw the creation of truly life-changing, effective drugs like statins, and that has set the bar high enough that I think we’ve passed the inflection point at which approaches like high-throughput screening are becoming less likely to yield a substantial improvement in effectiveness. I’ve used the analogy before of drug development occurring on an adaptive landscape (Figure 2), with every improvement moving up a hill towards the theoretical perfect medicine at the apex. The higher up the hill one gets, the harder it is to move uphill and most efforts move sideways or down, simply because there’s more territory in those directions. This is a constraint that a disruptive innovation would have to overcome in some way.

Figure 2

Figure 2: The adaptive landscape for drug development.  Yes I drew this myself.  I would plug the drawing program, except I think they’d probably prefer not to be associated with this image. Continue reading →