Dr. Jeremy Levin: Biotech in the Balance

We hear the term biotech an awful lot, but many people in the regular listening audience may not understand exactly what we're talking about.

So when we reference biotech, what do we mean by that?

It's a very important word.

It was first used roughly in the 1970s.

And what it means is that unlike for years and years and years, The pharmaceutical companies had developed a way of finding chemicals that you gave to somebody to change a disease.

We saw this, it's like aspirin, it's like Tylenol.

You basically have a chemical, you take it and it changes the disease, but you're not 100% sure about, at the time, what it does or how it works.

Biotechnology is very different.

Biotechnology is developed in 1973, where for the first time we started to unpack all the pieces of the human cell And that's terribly important.

You were looking at genes.

You were looking at proteins.

You were looking at what was on the surface of the cell.

And biotechnology began to unpack that and say, well, wait a second.

You've got these incredible molecules inside the cell and on its surface that we should understand.

And let us take them and turn them into a medicine.

And that's a very technical approach.

For a little while, it was a bit of a dream.

And then something rather magical happened actually in San Francisco, where one scientist turned to what was a venture capital, somebody who had never before been spent money at all in trying to figure this out and said, look, I might be able to make a medicine by thinking through what are the pieces of a cell and what I should be tackling.

And the venture capitalist said, that's crazy, but I'm willing to put money onto it.

And from that moment in 1973, it took a little while, but by 1976, one of the major companies, one of the best medical companies ever actually called Genentech was born.

And from there, we gave birth to what today is an industry which is largely unseen and And you're right, Rob, it's really very much unseen.

It's an industry of over a thousand different companies.

All are overwhelmingly spending money to find new medicines.

They don't make profits, the vast majority.

They sell their stock to raise capital to try and find a new medicine.