There are scientists who can print human organs and tissues using a 3D printer. There are viruses that are able to replace broken or missing genes in your genome. There is a system that can pull immune cells out of your body, re-engineer them, and put them back to fight against cancer. There are ways to make your body produce its own vaccines. This is biohacking, and it is the future of health and medicine.
First of all, for those of you unfamiliar with current trends in technology and engineering, hacking has taken on a new meaning than what it was a few years ago. Now less about rolling lines of code and fast typing to break into secure servers, hacking is more about finding easier ways to accomplish goals by using things like data or systems or objects in new ways. Events like Hack The City are an example of using big data to make cities better places to live.
All that being said, I am here today to declare that the tech crowd has for too long held the monopoly on hacking. It is time for biology to take hacking to the next level: biohacks. No, this isn’t a Terminator movie, and no, I am not talking about creating a new species of zombie soldiers to take over the planet and enslave the humans. I am talking about using basic biological principles applied in novel ways to create a total paradigm shift in how we look at diagnosing, treating and preventing disease.
This is where I should probably say that I didn’t invent the concept of biohacking, this is just a new label for a group of methods that have been used by the biotechnology industry for the better part of the last 40 years. When recombinant DNA technology came on the scene, the game totally changed. Suddenly scientists could cut up DNA, paste it back together, and basically make whatever they wanted. Anything was possible. Glow-in-the-dark animals? Check. Cows that fart less? No problem. Cabbage that produces scorpion venom? Done. Most biohacking projects, however, are not this ridiculous.
Biohacking is now a few hundred billion dollar-a-year business, most of which is devoted to healthcare. It has been used to produce protein and antibody therapeutics, vaccines of all types, and even gene therapies, and that is nowhere near the end of the possibilities. From new antibiotics to nutritional supplements and nutriceuticals, we are just now realizing what is possible when you know how to hijack biological systems to do your bidding. The real advantages, however, come when you talk about the bottom line dollars and cents with respect to the pharmaceutical industry.
Chemistry is hard. That is why it takes you 8 years to get a PhD to become a chemist. The process of developing a new chemical drug is extremely difficult, tedious and expensive. Discovering a new drug now costs over $5 billion, and 93% of new small molecule drugs don’t make it to the market (which is half the success rate of biological therapeutics), so the traditional chemical compound pharmaceuticals are not a viable option anymore. That is where biology comes to the rescue.
Biopharmaceuticals are easy to discover because DNA is easy to manipulate. If something doesn’t quite work how you want it to, try changing a few base pairs around and see if that helps. It is also highly scalable. The production is usually done in bacteria, yeast, or insect cells that are extremely easy to work with and that grow at astonishing rates. Some production systems double their product every 20 minutes. That is insanely fast. Biohacking is the easiest way to go from identifying a new disease to producing a new marketable treatment, and it is much cheaper than traditional methods of drug discovery.
If you want to know where the future of biology is going, biohacking is a safe bet. The push for translational research and application-based development are moving science away from the pure “knowledge for the sake of knowledge” (which I will talk about later this week). We need to respond accordingly by giving biology students a taste of this new biohacking movement in high school or at least right away in college. We need professors who will press the importance and the significance of the biotechnology industry while still teaching students the roots of science.
Biohacking is going to change the way we think about healthcare, disease, and the pharmaceutical industry. If I can’t convince you of that, spend 5 minutes with the CEO of any major biotechnology company and ask them where the industry is going. Most of them would love to tell you how successful they are going to be, and the truth is most of them aren’t even intentionally bragging, they are just telling you how it is.
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