We all know that 2020 was a very challenging year on the human and planetary health front. While we would not wish to go through this collective experience again, as we go into 2021, with hopeful signs of a vaccine to control Covid, here are five silver linings for entrepreneurs looking to build lasting engineering biology companies.
Jennifer Doudna, who discovered CRISPR, and co-founded Mammoth Biosciences to build a platform company around it was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She joins a small group of academic legends (George Church, Steve Quake) who are able to translate scientific discoveries into companies by nurturing the scientist-entrepreneurs who work on them.
A lasting legacy of Covid is an acceleration of healthcare innovation pace & velocity of solutions. Engineering biology played a key role to get us to treatment faster – CRISPR-based tests from Mammoth Biosciences & others, vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, and monoclonal antibodies from Regeneron & Eli Lilly. By digitizing biology, delivering applications and platforms, and investing in biomanufacturing, we are closing the engineering biology innovation loop. This accelerated pace from bench to bedside will result in precision treatments for disease areas that have not made progress in a long time.
The Supreme Court has signaled the survival of ACA. The FDA has approved treatments at a speed that was unthinkable till recently. The FDA has also heralded a new age in the use of Real World Evidence as part of new treatment development that is accelerating time to market and reducing costs.
Remote living propelled the growth of telehealth services. As proven, repeatable business models such as subscriptions became mainstream, investors became bullish in supporting digital health companies.
With food as the vanguard, scores of entrepreneurs are targeting other industries like fashion, construction, biomanufacturing, brain health, and more to use biology to reinvent industries, while improving human and planetary health.
