Shaping Biotech’s 6th Decade: A Worldview on What’s Next

As the first biotech company celebrates 50 years of working to help patients, BIO notes this milestone to explore lessons from the industry’s evolution and to discuss the forces accelerating and complicating the innovation of medicines today and for the decade ahead. This 6th decade will be taking place simultaneously in biotech incubators around the world, beyond the original few cradles for our industry. Since the first bioengineered insulin, biotech has created myriad new modalities and embodies the frontier of AI with protein structure prediction and more to redefine druggable diseases. Advances in clinical research technologies enable smarter and faster trials than ever before. However, biotech also faces sociopolitical forces including misinformation about those new modalities, the rise of independent biohackers circumventing regulated pathways, plus economic barriers to cross-border trade. Such forces may drive capital to alternative industries to the detriment of medical progress. This session will discuss how the biotech community can best navigate these tides and deliver more of the treatments, vaccines, and cures the world needs. Panel developed in conjunction with Scientific American and Springer Nature publications.