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Comment by EMIRELADERO | Hacker News Reader

Could you give some examples/directions for interesting things that have popped up in the period you're mentioning? Sounds like a fun time.

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The entire class of "biologics" drugs only came about in the past 15 years thanks to advances in sequencing and biotech. They are the mainstays of treatment for dozens of serious dermatologic, rheumatologic, and GI diseases, not to mention they directly cured multiple cancers.

Not op, but I’m in the field and can give you some things to read about:

- CAR-T

- CRISPR

- PRIME editing

- Base editing

- Modified mRNA

- PD-1 inhibitors

- On the cusp of personalized cancer vaccines

- ADCs

- Structure correctors

- Targeted protein degraders

- siRNAs

These have all really hit their stride in the past 15 years. Guess where all of them initially came from? Random ass government-funded academic research. Sure, you can split hairs with me on the 15 years and NIH/NSF etc funding, but it’s basically true. We are killing the golden goose…

Are any of these technologies profitable currently?

Unsure if you’re genuine or trying to be edgy, but I’ll bite—-yes, most of them make significant profits currently.

Sorry, I am not involved with biotech. Genuinely curious.

Edit. My impression of bio tech is that upfront costs are high and timeline for commercialization is long, and the only real biotech firm that I am aware of is Theranos. So I am probably coming from a place of ignorance.

Ah yea, biotech has been around for a while now and almost all best selling drugs are biotech drugs now a days.

Delivery vectors for nucleic acid have really progressed too. Peptide design and screening (also high throughput tools in general) have developed and led to great advances in peptide conjugates, such as peptide radioligands.

Tools wise cheap sequencing is a big one.

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