Abstract
Synthetic biology holds great promise for a number of application areas, and in particular for human health care. It may help to address the challenge of ever increasing innovation cost that the pharmaceutical industry is currently facing, with the number of new drugs approved per billion US dollar spent on research and development halved every 9 years since 1950. In this book chapter we review the challenges that the pharmaceutical industry is confronted with, present and analyze examples of applications of synthetic biology in this field, and discuss potential changes to the industry’s intellectual property management that the advent of synthetic biology might bring about.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that we use the term “synthetic biology” in the broader sense of “the design and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world” (http://syntheticbiology.org/FAQ.html). In the narrower sense, synthetic biology means to employ, in such design and construction, a standardized set of parts.
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- 3.
Assuming an average life expectancy of 68 years WHO (2009) and constant DALY numbers throughout life.
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The facts about Amyris are based on “Amyris Biotechnologies,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Case E331, 2009.
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Henkel, J., Lüttke, R. (2014). Synthetic Biology: Solving the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Innovation Problems?. In: de Miguel Beriain, I., Romeo Casabona, C. (eds) Synbio and Human Health. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9196-0_2
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