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This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Michael Kuhrt contributed 542 entries already.
Well ladies and gentlemen of the biotechnology community, welcome back after the silly season. I hope you had a nice one, whether it was in the sunny bit, the rainy bit or the bits that were on fire. As usual, summer in Europe was quiet. I see we still have a Eurozone, which is nice, and shows that the revolutionary, biotech-driven solution I came up with earlier in the year is still working.
Bioeconomy is the new health, and that is official. You only have to look at all the planning for Horizon 2020 and all the big words coming out of politicians at national and European levels to see that. But is Europe really ready or willing to embrace what it will take to replace existing technologies with new, bio-driven ones?
Twenty-eight percent of the products given marketing authorisation between November 2010 and October 2011 in the US and one-third of all the new drugs in the EU have biotechnological origins. And experts unanimously agree that the market share of biotechnology products will continue to grow in the future. While the small-molecule drug market is predicted to expand by 3.9% annually between now and 2015, the market for biopharma products is expected to grow by more than 10% a year.
Good news! After some thinking, I’ve solved the eurocrisis and saved national investment in biotechnology! As with most people who champion a single Europe, what is going to happen in the eurozone weighs heavily on my mind. Not just because of the surreal and seemingly uncontrollable debt crisis, but also because investment in growth in most European countries has stalled.
What is the Human Toxome Project? It’s a wide-reaching programme aimed at helping us to reconsider how hazard/risk assessment has been performed over the last 50 years on marketed substances like chemicals, cosmetic products, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, biocides and feedstuffs.
I co-chaired a session at the Commission’s Innovation in Healthcare’ conference recently, and learned a very interesting lesson there that is overwhelmingly obvious, yet overlooked in our continuing mission to become one Europe.
In the last 30 years, biotechnology has become a major source of innovation in combating untreated diseases and improving current treatments. A better understanding of the human genome rests at the heart of this incredible technological progress. With the dawn of personal medicine, we are also witnessing the dawn of a new era in medicine.
The increase in lifestyle and ageing-associated diseases that has paralleled a rise in drug development costs along with the financial constraints of the global economy is putting enormous pressure on the sustainability of healthcare systems.
If Jane Austen was writing in the early 21st century in Europe, she could well have begun one of her novels with: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a country in possession of a biotech sector, must be in want of a pharma company.
The societal and economic challenges facing Europe and the world are complex and interconnected. The Bioeconomy Strategy and Action Plan “Innovating for Sustainable Growth: a Bioeconomy for Europe”, which was adopted by the European Commission on 13 February 2012, offers a unique approach to addressing these challenges in a comprehensive way.