Synthetic Biology/Bioengineering – A New Route to Drug Discovery & Delivery

Importance for Intellus Members

Insights professionals will find themselves called upon to explain therapies, devices and delivery systems developed by this novel process to providers, payers and consumers and assess responses. Client-side members need to be aware of the drug, diagnostic and delivery techniques being used in your company and competitors. Agency side members are faced with the greater challenge of understanding of what is going on in client and potential client companies and being prepared to make helpful suggestions for designing studies around Bioengineering products. There will be profound concerns about the ethics and safety of semi-autonomous and situationally responsive therapies.

Bioengineering Potential

Rational Drug Design in tandem with Computer Aided Drug Design led us to create ligand-based and structure-based drugs which were similar to their biomedical target, enabling them to bind with and activate that target to release a protein of choice. 

Bioengineering has already led to significant advances in Medical Devices including advanced prosthetics. Now we are on the cusp of seeing Synthetic Biology (also known as Bioengineering) and a multi-disciplinary approach providing totally new routes to effective therapies. Based on the principles of engineering, physics and biology, scientists can design and build synthetic gene circuits and other molecular entities which do not exist naturally. These entities can be used to re-program natural cells or create non-cell mechanisms to express therapeutic proteins of functions. The field of biomedical engineering encompasses the process of testing the millions of combinations to create new drugs, where engineering (genetic engineering, tissue engineering, fluids engineering) is required.

“By approaching biology as an engineering discipline, we are now beginning to create programmable medicines and diagnostic tools with the ability to sense and dynamically respond to information in our bodies,” says Jim Collins, Termeer professor of medical engineering and science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), quoted in The Scientist.

Falling costs of DNA sequencing and analysis and manipulation tools developed with CRISPR have helped to make Synthetic Biology available to start-ups and smaller pharma companies.

What is the scale of this development? According to SynBioBeta, a professional network for biological engineers, investment in synthetic-biology companies raised about $4.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021 alone, more than four times the investment in the same quarter a year earlier. McKinsey research suggests that some 400 use cases for bioengineering, almost all of which are scientifically feasible, could have an economic impact of $2 trillion to $4 trillion per year from 2030 to 2040 in a wide range of industries including pharma and healthcare.

What Can We Expect?

The next likely developments will be drug delivery systems and metabolic imaging systems. For example, non-invasive technology to constantly deliver medication to the back of the eye to treat Wet AMD and new ways to deliver targeted therapies to solid tumors.

Useful further reading: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Synthetic-Biology#:~:text=Synthetic%20biology%20is%20a%20field,in%20medicine%2C%20manufacturing%20and%20agriculture       

https://bts.ucsf.edu/research/therapeutic-bioengineering