Future-looking Panel Sees Smarter, Faster Medicine

George Miller

May 9, 2007-Imagine a world where aging has been tamed... where through a combination of ubiquitous sensors and constant monitoring, your doctor will prescribe treatments at the earliest indications of disease.

Such are some of the visions that a panel of biotech prognosticators painted during a lunchtime panel discussion today. The panel was led by BIO President and CEO Jim Greenwood.

The ten-years-future world they envisioned might be a bit like Lake Woebegone, the fictitious Midwestern town from Garrison Keillor's Prarie Home Companion radio show, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

"We can control aging," said panelist Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, to polite laughter. Sharp is Institute Professor at MIT and was co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering work on the structure of genes.

"It isn't so far fetched. [Scientists] are studying the relationship between calorie intake and aging. Fewer calories lead to longevity," he said.

"The real danger is that we'll all be good looking," quipped panelist Virginia Postrel, author of the book, The Substance of Style, which advocates that appearance has meaning beyond looks and drive much of the choices we make. Her view of the biotech-enabled future included the sensors for early disease detection. But she also implied that scientist-created world could have a dark side.

"The most common genre of movies where scientists appear is the horror movie," she said, only half kidding. "Sometimes the scientist is the hero."

She added that, with the biosciences, "we're afraid of pain and suffering and death." The biotech community, she said, has "a really big benefit to offer people."

"We have to be careful about how we are perceived," agreed Sharp. He recalled the atmosphere in Boston when recombinant DNA was first being debated and was viewed with suspicion and some fear by the public. He said that the debate and talk were important to the eventual acceptance of the technology. The same holds true for gene therapy today and other technologies into the future. "We have to keep that dialog going and keep [the public] coming along with the science," said panelist Craig C. Mello, Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, The Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. "People are sympathetic; they just need to be educated about the facts of the science."

Mello, and panelist Dr. Robert S. Langer, Institute Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, said they believe that more drug discovery work will be done academically rather than commercially in the future.

Panelists agreed that ten to twenty years hence drug discovery will become faster and less expensive than it is today. Clinical testing prior to commercialization, however, will likely remain expensive.

Sharp advised that the United States has no monopoly on biotech. "There is science in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. I see us as having increasing competition...biotech is something we have to keep competing at," he said.

He also noted that increasing studies of the brain will yield big benefits for people having emotional and behavioral issues, as well as those fighting addictions: "As we learn how that very complicated organ works, well have more options to help people."

Panelists Mello and Postrel agreed that the cost of not treating disease has to be examined, perhaps as closely as the costs of treatment are examined today. Drug development costs should be viewed relative to the economic benefit of a healthy society.