New biotechnology
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
The era of well-known biotechnology is coming to an end, and research approaches in this area and industry are waiting for big changes, which became the topic of discussions at the European Summit of Industrial Biotechnology held recently in Graz, Austria (European Summit of Industrial Biotechnology 2016)
"If there is no biotechnology, the world will freeze," says the report document of the summit, posted on the website of the Austrian Research Center of Industrial Biotechnology (Austrian Research Center of industrial biotechnology).
"Biotechnologically obtained drugs predominate among the best-selling drugs, eight of the ten best–selling drugs are biotechnological," Professor Nigel Titchener-Hooker said in his speech at the summit from University College London.
Within the framework of the European Commission's Horizon 2020 program, 3.8 billion euros are allocated for research projects of bio-economic importance, that is, projects involving the use of biotechnologies using renewable biological raw materials. An additional 3.7 billion until 2020 will be spent on stimulating public-private partnership within the European Bioconsortium – a partnership between the European Commission and the largest bio–industrialists of European countries - based on strategic analysis, said the head of the bioconsorcium Dirk Carrez.
With such investments, the world of biotechnology is progressing very quickly, experts say. Thanks to new technologies, the cost of products does not increase, and the time spent on its production is reduced. Thus, the use of in-line microfiltration and in-line chromatography reduces the processes from several hours to several minutes, and according to Titchener-Hooker, perfusion systems for passing blood-substituting solutions and biologically active substances through the vascular system of organs and tissues of the body also significantly (by 20%) reduce the cost of a number of procedures compared to traditional feeding systems. This, he believes, will make personalized medicine available by 2025, despite issues related to clinical trials and official permits.
Among biotechnological medical products, the ovarian cells of the Chinese hamster, which are used for the synthesis of recombinant proteins, occupy a particularly important place, and the development of systems based on the lines of these cells is one of the main priorities of the pharmaceutical industry. The research methods of genetic manipulation have radically changed: the CRISPR/Cas editing method has replaced mutagenesis and suppression of gene expression by RNA interference, which has reduced the time for creating cell lines from one year to three months.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 19.12.2016