TWC session 6!

Executive summary

Today we talked about the revolution of Bio Business in both Healthcare and Biomedical Sciences. Basically, bio business is a commercial activity that depends on the understanding of life and life processes. Bio business currently constitutes over 25% of global GDP and employs 40% of the world’s labor force.

Interesting observations and ideas

Prior to this lesson, bio business to me refers to traditional healthcare methods that involve the using of natural plant products to synthesis medicine such as those Chinese herbs that you can obtain from any of those Chinese herbal medicine shops. In fact, bio business includes a wide range of other things such as pharmaceuticals, food biotechnology, waste management etc.

Today someone gave a presentation on the human genome project, and subsequently asked the class if the proliferation of future genome projects is beneficial to the human race. During the course of her presentation, she mentioned that it is now possible to come out with designer babies – something which was strongly opposed to last time as it strongly violates the moral standards of the highly conservative societies of the past. Nowadays, it is acceptable to do so and couples are even able to pre select the gender of their children. Very often this raises questions as to whether humans are playing god. Yet, it is so pervasive in today’s society that people in general are aligning their paradigm to see it as the norm.

Key Takeaways

I find it quite interesting when prof mentioned that Bio business constitutes over 25% of global GDP and employs some 40% of the world’s labor force. This means that 1.6% of the world’s labor force is needed to generate every 1% of global GDP that is being contributed by BioBusiness. Evidently, BioBusiness is quite labor intensive and is not very effective in generating income per human capital.

Another thing I would like to point is that by the definition of BioBusiness, it is very broad in a sense that it includes almost anything that has got to do with the understanding of human life and life processes. This seems to be over generalization to me and this might lead to the above-mentioned figures being skewed towards ones that encompass industries other than biobusiness.

In one of the readings: Bio Business in Asia, Health care , we are seeing an increase in the expenditure of health care in Asia. Spending in healthcare is now projected to exceed UDS $250 billion. This inflation of spending comes at a time when the commercial potential of healthcare provision and management is being increasingly recognized, in the face of influenza such as SARS that has affected many countries in Asia to a large extent. This calls for more proactive action in the realm of healthcare services and hence more money being pumped into research and development for the prevention of similar influenzas.

In addition to those abovementioned factors, new insights and knowledge of the previously unknow realm of genomic simply implies that the traditional pre-genoomic drug development process is being shortened. Success rates of drug development has also increased as it is now possible to accurately design drugs with increased knowledge of the human genomic.

Another interesting trend to note is that pharmaceutical and biotech players are starting to outsource their non-core aspects of their operations so that they can focus on building their core value proposition. The outsourcing market is currently being dominated by big pharma players as its biggest spenders and customers – spending some #35 billion on outsourced R&D alone in 2001.

Issues for further discussion

I would like prof to actually talk about the negative aspects of sequencing the human genome, particularly, the threat of bio terrorism. With increasingly international efforts to clamp down on the development of conventional weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs, the attractiveness of unconventional weapons of mass destruction has only increased for terrorists. What was once a “poor man’s atomic bomb” is increasingly becoming more viable for terrorists to achieve their agendas on a global scale.

Personal ratings

I would rate today’s session as 7.5 out of 10. Today’s session was rather interesting and focused on bio business, and we also had more time for the presentations, which I find very interesting.