How Will Biopharma Look In 2032?

By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL

Whether palm readings, tarot cards, or crystal balls, for centuries humans have used a variety of gadgets and mystics to try to predict the future. But for my money, C-level executives tend to be much more accurate. This is because they are not only plugged into the trends but also helping to set them. So, Life Science Leader asked several biopharmaceutical executives how they thought the biopharmaceutical industry would look in the next decade. Here’s what they had to say. Don’t miss out on all the other knowledge and wisdom provided by the more than 40 biopharmaceutical executives taking part in this year’s annual outlook by becoming a Life Science Leader subscriber today.

Where Do You Envision The Biopharmaceutical Industry Will Be In 2032?

Sekar (Sek) Kathiresan, M.D., cofounder and CEO, Verve Therapeutics: Looking beyond 2022 and into the next decade, I expect to see more one-and-done therapies across acute and chronic disease areas. Over the past 50 years, we’ve adhered to the chronic care model of daily pills and intermittent injections for common diseases like heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and many more – but that model is broken.

I can envision a future where the industry moves from this chronic care model to single-course treatments that can permanently fix a given causal factor like LDL cholesterol and make a change for health at the molecular level. In the next 10 years, you will see increasing examples of this move from chronic care to one-and-done.

Other companies in the industry are developing one-and-done therapies for certain disorders, such as cardiomyopathy, a range of blood diseases such as sickle cell, and certain liver and lung diseases, like cystic fibrosis. Particularly for genetic diseases, where the flaw is in the DNA spelling, we are going to be increasingly able to fix that flaw with “molecular surgery.” We are on the verge of something entirely new.

Prem Premsrirut, M.D., Ph.D., founder and CEO, Mirimus: I envision the biopharmaceutical industry in 2032 to be geared toward personalized medicine, with each person or family taking ownership of their health data. With the cost of genomic sequencing, data mining, and personal monitoring applications (i.e., smart watches, etc.) decreasing, the ability to monitor our personal health and map out the treatment programs that will best suit our needs and individual lifestyles will come to fruition by 2032. We have seen a tremendous shift in self-diagnosis and health screening through phone apps, internet access to healthcare resources, and education on health topics. With the implementation of telehealth, many are able to address health concerns and ask the questions they need, on their own time in the comfort of their own space. With this start, the opportunities in the future for personalized healthcare are going to skyrocket with more “at-home” screening tests becoming available. This will allow people to have the most knowledge of their own health and give them the opportunity to take action. Personalized healthcare migrating to a patient-specific focus will allow for more tailored treatments, leading to the better well-being of the population.

Sung You, chief business and strategy officer at SalioGen and managing partner at PBM Capital: Development timelines for individual applications of platform technologies will continue to shorten at an accelerated rate, as they have in recent decades. For instance, RNA interference (RNAi) was an entirely new therapeutic modality 20 years ago and took over 15 years to get an approval in its class. Similarly, messenger RNA (mRNA) technology was developed over multiple decades, but it was not until a few months ago that we saw the first of its class getting approved. A global pandemic has shown what our industry can achieve with a therapeutic candidate moving through development with record-breaking speed, albeit with an unprecedented influx of resources. We have witnessed multiple examples of different classes of genetic medicines and editing technologies being discovered and developed at an accelerated speed – from zinc finger nucleases in the late ’90s to the latest CRISPR evolution and its various reiterations. By 2032, I believe we will have made those types of strides in in vivo genetic medicine technologies. We will start to see the longstanding potential of gene therapies and other forms of genome modification come to fruition as scalable clinical stage and commercialized therapies.  

With respect to personalized medicine versus standardized therapies, I don’t necessarily see the two as opponents. Personalized medicine is not always the most efficient or cost-effective approach to every medical condition. Rather than a decline in medicines for the masses, I think we will see an uptick in safer, more effective “mass” therapies as we gain better understanding of drug targets and drug delivery and a more sophisticated grasp of our own physiology.  Similar to how antiretroviral therapies changed the paradigm of HIV from a life-threatening diagnosis to a chronic disease that individuals can live with, we may see  even greater transformations to cure chronic disease using these novel genetic medicines.