Abstract

Strategies for biotechnology must take account of opportunities for research, innovation and business growth. At a regional level, public-private collaborations provide potential for such growth and the creation of centres of excellence. By considering recent progress in areas such as genomics, healthcare diagnostics, synthetic biology, gene editing and bio-digital technologies, opportunities for smart, strategic and specialised investment are discussed. These opportunities often involve convergent or disruptive technologies, combining for example elements of pharma-science, molecular biology, bioinformatics and novel device development to enhance biotechnology and the life sciences. Analytical applications use novel devices in mobile health, predictive diagnostics and stratified medicine. Synthetic biology provides opportunities for new product development and increased efficiency for existing processes. Successful centres of excellence should promote publicprivate business partnerships, clustering and global collaborations based on excellence, smart strategies and innovation if they are to remain sustainable in the longer term.

8. The power of partnerships and international collaboration

Few biotechnological opportunities can be effectively exploited by single countries alone, as the complexity and cost of research and development continues to rise and applications increasingly require multidisciplinary inputs. This could be in m-health where health-apps have been recognised as a global opportunity for the insurance industry (Guest, 2017) or web-based data sharing platforms such as MyGene2 which allow families and clinicians seeking molecular diagnoses to share data (Karow, 2017). International and public-private partnerships will become increasingly important in realising potential such as in understanding the basis of so-called ‘rare’ diseases. These affect less than 1 in 2,000 people in the EU28. Collectively however, such rare diseases are actually quite common (Boycott et al., 2017). International partnerships and shared data can improve the probability of finding other mutations in the same or similar genes. MyGene2 has accumulated 1,225 freely available data sets in its first year from 880 clinicians, families and researchers on 723 genes including many unique disease gene variants (Karow, 2017). The International Rare Diseases Research Consortium is developing strategies for enabling the diagnosis of all rare genetic diseases using common standards, tools and genomic analysis utilities (Parry, 2017; Boycott et al., 2017; Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, 2017; Im et al., 2015; Gabrielczyk, 2017). This should ultimately improve rapid diagnosis and treatment prospects for rare disease sufferers through collaborative partnerships. Regions seeking opportunities in biotechnology should seek to input their unique expertise and where possible facilities and investment to international and publicprivate partnerships such as these to create the new knowledge, jobs, economic and societal advantage that further progress will bring (Hirschler, 2017; Davies et al., 2017).