To help celebrate GEN’s 40th Anniversary with this special October issue, we asked scientists and business professionals in academia and industry to give us their reflections, impressions, and insights on the biotechnology industry and the life sciences. We also queried them on what they believe the future might look like for biotechnology. We sought the thoughts and opinions of those working in areas directly or indirectly related to one or more of GEN’s editorial pillars, that is, drug discovery, OMICS, gene editing, cancer research, infectious diseases, artificial intelligence and data management, translational medicine, and financial analysis and venture capital.
We asked them, for example, what stands out about the past 40 years of biotech, what has been the biggest change in the biotech industry, what is the most exciting recent development in this industry, and what are their hopes for the future of biotech. The GEN team is most appreciative of the range of thoughtful responses that we received. We are sure that you will be pleased when you read the following pages.
To all our respondents, a huge thank you from GEN.
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Hong Tang, MD, FACP
Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder, OnQuality Pharmaceuticals • Cancer Research
The past two decades have produced extraordinary advancements in cancer drug development. Targeted therapies, immune checkpoint inhibitors, and CAR-T cell therapies have transformed the lives of countless cancer patients, contributing to an overall improvement in survival rate. However, these new therapies often cause short- or long-term side effects that can be severe enough to force cancer patients to skip doses, reduce dosage levels, or stop treatments entirely. Improving quality of life for cancer patients is paramount. In precision cancer medicine, supportive care drugs that can address the specific side effects of new therapies are urgently needed. While many supportive care drugs have been developed in the last century for chemotherapy-related side effects, I hope to see a new wave of such developments to address the side effects of recently developed cancer therapies. People living through cancer therapy and its aftermath deserve to live full lives with reductions in suffering.