Top 10 Technology Trends in life sciences

On March 22, DeepTech, China's emerging technology content and hard technology service provider, held the "2019 Life Science Forum" in Shanghai, where scientists, investors and entrepreneurs from the biomedical field discussed in depth the scientific research innovation, technological revolution and future trends in the life science field. DeepTech exclusively operates media verticals such as MIT Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, and NewScientist.

DeepTech believes that the life science field will enter a new era in 2019. In 2019, including CRISPR gene editing, cutting-edge biotechnology such as synthetic biology technology and single-cell multi-omics technology will continue to make revolutionary breakthroughs, and further change the rules of the game in the field of life sciences, and also change the world we live in.

The global life sciences and healthcare market is growing in size. In 2014, China surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest biomedical market. In 2017, the market size of China's biomedicine industry has reached 341.719 billion yuan, and it is expected that by 2020, the market size of China's biomedicine will be twice that of Japan and surpass the United States to become the world's first.

At the forum, it was mentioned that now, China's biopharmaceutical market is ushering in a "golden age", and more and more emerging technology companies have been born in China, attracting more and more innovative talents. The booming domestic biomedical industry is forming a field of attention.

On the same day, DeepTech released the "Top 10 Technology Trends in the Life Sciences Field in 2019." Technology trends in the field of life sciences such as CRISPR toolkit, immunotherapy 2.0, cure of rare diseases, gene big data, nucleic acid drugs, brain science and brain-computer interface, smart medicine, non-invasive early diagnosis, synthetic biology technology and single-cell multi-omics were selected.

Jason Pontin, senior partner at Flagship Pioneering, breaks down each of these ten technology trends.

Zhao Ruilin, partner of Chende Capital, shared the possible hot spots in biomedical investment in the next three to five years at the DeepTech2019 Life Science Forum. He believes that the application of AI+ big data, cancer early screening, gene therapy, consumer-oriented gene sequencing and surgical robots will become hot spots for investment in the next three to five years.

Wang Liqun, president of Fosun Kite Biotechnology Co., LTD., delivered a speech at the meeting, he said that China is still facing many challenges in the industrialization of CAR-T therapy, we do not have to worry about too much behind foreign countries, but do not blindly think that we are the first.

In the roundtable discussion, Yang Fang, capital markets partner of Pricewaterhousecoopers, said that China is a big country of medical data, but the system used by each hospital is not necessarily the same, and the data structure is different, and it takes a lot of time and effort to make these unified structured data. But the ultimate outlook is certainly bright, but it will take a lot of time and effort to get to that line.

At the same time, the forum also announced 10 "DeepTech2019 Life Science innovation figures".

Top 10 Technology trends in Life Sciences in 2019:

1.CRISPR Kit (CRISPR/CasToolkit)

More than 30 years ago, scientists discovered regularly spaced clusters of short palindromic repeats in bacteria and found that such repeats made bacteria immune to viruses. In 2001, Spanish scientist Francisco Mojica officially named it CRISPR, and in 2012, two female scientists, Structural biologists Jennifer Doudna from the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier from Umea University in Sweden were the first to use CRISPR/Cas as a gene-editing system. In 2013, George Church of Harvard Medical School, Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lei Qi of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of California, San Francisco (now at Stanford University) published three papers that successfully applied the CRISPR/Cas system to mammalian cells.

The emergence of CRISPR/Cas9 led to the explosive development of the entire field of gene editing, and now many scientists have further expanded CRISPR/Cas gene technology, extending it from a single "gene scissors" to a multi-functional "gene toolkit". Demonstrates exciting application prospects based on the expanding CRISPR/Cas system. Scientists predict that CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology will change the society we live in and the organisms around us.

2. Immunotherapy2.0

More than 100 years ago, New York orthopedic surgeon William Coley accidentally found that postoperative streptococcus pyogenes infection caused sarcoma patients to regression of tumors, which opened the prelude of tumor immunotherapy, William Coley is also known as the father of tumor immunotherapy.

In 2018, the much-anticipated Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to American scientist James P. Allison and Japanese scientist Tasuku Honjo for their pioneering contributions to cancer immunotherapy. Nowadays, the number of cancer immunotherapy companies in the world is as high as hundreds, and more than a dozen immunotherapy products in China have declared clinical trials, and the relevant research results have been reported frequently, and the ultimate goal of curing cancer has been steadily moving forward.