The technologies that will drive translational breakthroughs

I have directed this question to the biotech/pharma researchers in a LinkedIn poll: Where do you expect the most prominent breakthroughs come from in translational medicine between 2025 and 2030? Let's go over the results briefly.

Compounds designed with AI: 37%

Like all other industries there is an enormous expectation from AI in pharma/biotech industry that it might be even being as a silver bullet. The technological breakthrough in other industries and applications (image/video processing, generation, large language models) have raised the expectations from AI in biotech. This is not baseless, considering the very significant success of AlphaFold in protein structure. Time will tell how much of these expectations will be met.

Gene therapy: 43%

Gene therapy was seen as a savior in 2010s, after several clinical breakthroughs for rare diseases and cancer. It has seen some setback in recent years, due to failure of clinical trials in certain cases. Nevertheless, the recent acquisition of Verve Therapeutics by Eli Lilly with a valuation of $1.3B demonstrates there is still pretty much hope in this field.

Stem cell therapy: 18%

Stem cell research literally took of in 90s and 2000s, being covered by the media constantly. After the initial hype, now it is leading to a silent revolution in translational medicine. Especially the usage of high-resolution and high-throughput omics technologies facilitates the discovery of master regulators of cell differentiation. We can expect more stem cell therapies developed in the near future.

Other: 2%

Many new technolgies can faciliate discoveries in translational medicine. These include, single-cell multiomics & proteomics, spatial transcriptomics & proteomics, 3D cell cultures, organoid systems and RNA-based therapeutics.