Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Nanotechnology Roadmap...Where's Pharm Bio???

Here a link to Guy Kawasaki's blog regarding a Nanotech Roadmap completed by the Batelle Memorial Institute...

Guy labels it "must-read"...I agree...I find this technological frontier fascinating...if only I could understand the material, (it was a struggle to get through the Executive Summary...)

I do have one or two questions...

Primarily, where's the Pharm Bio industry in all of this?... similar to the Human Genome, Nanotechnology appears to present great promise in the areas of health and life science...there just doesn't seem to be that much on these areas in the report...the participants tend to be from a variety of universites, or "labs" and "institutes", with not one pharma company on the list...the closest thing is an organization called the American Academy of Nanomedicine.

The table of contents list 39 individual articles produced by the Working groups which address specific issues...of this, 5 articles appear to deal with DNA, biology, life sciences, etc...(It is sometimes hard to tell just from the titles of the articles, and I am, quite frankly, not going to read the whole report). This hardly seems like this area is getting the focus it would appear to deserve (if all of the promise of the technology comes to pass) from the Pharm Bio side anyway...

I just haven't heard of any signifcant research efforts based on these ideas from any industry players...perhaps these efforts are underway, and I am just not aware of it...or maybe the Big Pharma companies are still stuck in the "chase the molecule" model? Perhaps this is an example of why drug pipelines are so dry...perhaps someone with more experience on the research side of the industry could provide a more current update of the current status of these efforts...

Secondly, could someone read the executive summary on this document and explain what it means to the Pharm Bio industry? Are we going to get our drug products from little desk-top factories? If so, how soon?, and will it cost less?

Maybe nanotechnology and future medicine will solve all our problems...only the future will tell, just ask Ray


some related links...

Guy's Blog- not to science oriented, he's a venture capitalist...

Batelle Memorial Institute

Foresight Institute

American Academy of Nanomedicine

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