So just what does the future of biotechnology look like?

Technology is progressing at a thrilling pace and as someone who loves to hear what some new company is doing to produce specialised solutions; technology investigation is something I love to pass the time with. With new regulations, devices, software, and medicines evolving, what’s not to get excited about?

If there’s a newspaper I’ll be reading the science and technology sections; my YouTube subscriptions have been filled with science technology or philosophy channels for years now, and I’m trying to keep in the loop with my industry reading Pharmaceutical Engineering magazines and my list of things to learn always seems to keep increasing! Yeah, I know, I’m an outspoken geek.

Every time I walk into a JB Hi-Fi, I love to have a look at the new televisions just to see how unreal the image quality has become. But it’s not just the television in the stores, our phones can now take snaps of the jaw-dropping resolution, and we can now send files to one another instantly which would have taken a box of floppy discs in the early 2000s. The new technologies breaking through in the science realm is what I want to discuss today!

‘Started from the bottom now we’re here.’

Historians love to talk about a few key moments where a world of possibility was able to come from one invention. One of my favourite books by Yuval Noah Harari ‘Sapiens’ talks about innovative revolutions which took place as Homo Sapiens developed: the first being agriculture which completely changed the way humans eat, live, travel, die, evolve and work.

There would be too many to mention in such a short piece, but some others would include the invention of the steam engine: changing the way we move goods and people; electricity: providing lighting, heating and cooling, and its resulting changes in the way we communicate (the telephone, telegraph, radio, and television); and the computing transistor: increasing the amount and speed of information which can be processed within a computer.

But some are calling the emergence of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology being so influential that one could argue their combination will result in another revolution, and it’s happening right now!

No, I’m not talking about Arnie coming to terminate you…yet

These terms, which I find exciting (hopefully you do too :D) allow an explosion of opportunity to flourish. This progression isn’t just in the device(s) most of us carry around, but there is significant innovation happening in every corner of our society’s technology, and this continues to provide additional benefits to our digital epoch. The tiny transistors in our phones are becoming as small as electrons providing incomprehensible computing speeds. I recently smashed my phone and opened up the phone just to look inside, and the size of the parts inside…staggering!

We can now use cloud technology to store our data in enormous volumes off-site. Our modern networks allow us to transfer that data between devices in volumes and speeds which would have seemed impossible in times past. When we combine all of these feats it means that we are producing, sharing, translating and making conclusions about more information than we know what to do with. Now we can teach computers how to recognise patterns, and that’s where the magic happens.

If you ever wanted to be a computer nerd, now’s the time!

Tech companies have started dominating the world in the 21st century, and this is why the emergence of data-scientists, analysts, programmers, and software developers is so prevalent in the modern professional arena. Someone needs to use all that data we are creating; someone needs to know what the trends are; know what direction the data is taking the business and conclude what can be done about it. I swear google knows what question I’m about to ask it before I do!

Once we have created all this data and we’ve made our conclusions, our computer whiz python programmers in big tech can now teach the computers how to analyse the data without the need of a human. The program can make its conclusions by itself and after enough improvement, these machines can do our jobs faster, for longer, cheaper and eventually better than we can. These advancements can be applied in many areas, but given my fields of knowledge come in around science, engineering, pharmaceuticals and medicine, that’s where I’ll stick to today.

Innovation at the cellular level

So if you were to work in a research lab and you’re trying to understand what causes a certain type of cancer, you would be looking for proteins called ‘biomarkers’. You need to detect which ones work with each other to cause the cancer you’re researching within your patient’s tissue sample.

Innovations mean the days of manually conducting each of your experiments are considered outdated and inefficient. Manual experimentation allows extra room for error; its process is repetitive; it has a slower turnaround time and would consume more physical resources than a machine would.

Now scientists can now use auto-staining machines to analyse 6 different proteins at a time, and use an automated microscope to analyse more of the sample with higher-quality images! Then, using machine learning, the researcher can teach a program to analyse the pictures, produce data, and then determine which biomarkers cause the cancer they’re experimenting with.

This is the NBN compared to dial-up since researchers would have to count the cancer cells in their heads visually. These developments enable researchers to improve their knowledge faster, increasing the likelihood of discovering more cures for more cancers.

How about a laboratory in your bathroom?

But in the future, we all will have bought special toilets which have cancer-detecting analytical equipment inside. The toilet will be able to analyse your waste as soon as it’s produced and find out that you might have signs of cancer or other diseases years before it they begin to cause issues.

The toilet software will have analysed tens of millions of samples in the past and as discoveries are shared, updates could be installed to look for other health problems and diagnose you better than our current medical system could. Who would have thought you could be so productive on the can?!

Now we can control everything (almost)

The more we learn about what it is that we can control, the more the things that we can’t control stick out like a sunburnt penguin. To solve these issues, we are creating new devices which produce real-time data never previously recorded. New advancements mean we can monitor things remotely, and then change them. Like how you can track your UberEats as it approaches your front door.

But why is control so important? Well, control is fundamental in chemical engineering. If you are cultivating medicinal cannabis you need to control the temperature, the carbon dioxide concentration, the light exposure, the humidity, the type of fertiliser you’re giving the plant, the amount of clean air within the environment and the list keeps going.

So if you have sensors constantly monitoring these parameters, you can teach the computer program to keep itself between two levels. The machine can automatically adjust itself to make sure it maintains that Goldilocks zone all while you can solve other problems of the world.

Earlier when I was talking about transistors being made as small as electrons, this couldn’t happen without the use of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the ability to create things so small they’re size is measured in nanometres.

By controlling the temperature, concentration, pressure, viscosity and several other parameters, manufacturers can ‘print’ tiny shapes into whatever they like. They are made from all types of materials to produce equipment for specific purposes and this is the beauty of 3-D printing. You can program a machine to manufacture material into the perfect shape. This can be done by using a different program used to design the product accurately and precisely.

A world of pure imagination

Enter biotechnology! Even though natural selection and the domestication of agricultural plants and animals would be considered biotechnology, in the 21st century we can be far more specific with its uses. Modern biotech for medicine had its first breakthrough when scientists genetically modified bacteria found in the pancreas of domesticated animals to produce synthetic insulin. Insulin being the naturally produced peptide used to lower blood sugar levels in the body, vital for the treatment of those with diabetes.

Since then biotechnology has come a long way. We can now program a computer to print a prosthetic arm, and we are on the way to printing fully functional organs which can fit the patient’s requirements perfectly! This can be done by scientists who can program cells to function in a specific way, similar to how you can now buy an ‘Impossible Burger’ at Grill’d (give it a crack you seriously can’t tell the difference).

If you can print an organ, think about all those people on an organ transplant list receiving ‘printed’ kidneys, hearts and livers, or amputees having printed limbs. But why stop at human tissue? We can use nanotechnology to design our medicines as well.

A personalised touch for your condition

Given our advancements in formulation chemistry (my major at uni), a scientist can design medicines to be smaller and designed for a specified region of the body where there the diseased tissue would be found. They are less invasive for the patient, can act faster, and cause fewer nasty side-effects.

Nanotechnology also allows products to penetrate the cell membrane and the blood-brain barrier, two behemoth hurdles that drug manufacturers have trouble overcoming in the olden days. These new advancements in drug development mean that in the future when our researchers have made discoveries on the diseases of the present, there is a larger arsenal to attack them head-on.

Most of the diseases that our society faces are those typically found later in life such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease and cancer. Of course, individuals suffer from many other diseases, and some develop these earlier in life, which is truly tragic; but a huge chunk of our scientific resources are attempting to combats diseases of our more senior humans.

Last decade scientists created a gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 which can cut out strands of DNA in our genes (ooooo…ahhhhhh…woooaaahhh). Chronic diseases within our body are usually caused by genes if it doesn’t come from an external pathogen (like COVID-19).

This new feather in the cap will contribute significantly to the treatment of the diseases causing us the biggest problems. Eventually, when we find out how certain diseases get expressed in the body, we will be able to remove the bad genes which cause them. Who knows, in a few decades death as we know it could put on hold.

And finally… the biotech in COVID

To press on from my last post with the COVID-19 vaccine, there has been significant progress with Phase II clinical trials commencing (insert success kid photo). A company Moderna who has developed a solution in record time using the CRISPR-Cas9 technology mentioned earlier. The first step was to ‘sequence’ the virus which breaks it down into the most basic building blocks. You can’t cook a meal properly without knowing all the ingredients!

The spikes of the virus make it special because they penetrate our cells easily. So the researchers identified the protein on the spikes which make an excellent contender for the vaccine! Scientists then type in genetic instructions on this long strand of proteins called ‘messenger RNA’ (mRNA) which you can inject straight into patients.

These instructions are delivered to our immune system where it commands the body to make copies of these spikes just as if the patient had been infected by COVID-19. The immune system is then able to study this spike all by itself, and in turn, develop ways to protect the body against a real infection.

Normally our vaccine experts have to recreate it in the lab and alter it requiring time-consuming and intensive work. This alternative method only uses a small portion of the virus which is responsible for finding its way into our cells. Those spike instructions are injected straight into the immune system without the rest of the virus which wants to multiply and harm us.

This is a new solution accomplished in an unprecedented 42 days and could prove to be a method of vaccine development we can use for other diseases in the future. Fingers crossed these trials are successful and we can start large scale manufacturing this vaccine sooner rather than later.

What a time and place to be alive

As a devout optimist and enthusiastic engineer, I feel blessed to be born in Australia in 1994. Now in 2020, I am early in my career and the emergence of these new technological advancements will bring about novel solutions to some of life’s challenging obstacles that humans are yet to conquer. I’m excited to see what will occur during the span of my lifetime, and how I might be able to contribute to some of these incredible projects along the way!

Next time we are going to discuss new scientific changes to our consciousness, memory, emotion and the development of mental health solutions. Hopefully, I’ll catch ya next time!