Biotechnology

VC Funding, Vaccines, Technology

What is Biotechnology?

Biotech: refers to the use of living organisms or their products to modify human health and the human environment.

Recombinant DNA Technology has made this all possible

Applications

Healthcare Gene therapy, pharma, genetic testing, Sequencing

of Human Genome

Green Biotech Genetic engineering to produce environmentally

detrimental products through a renewable feedstock

Bioinformatics Using computational models to enhance

understanding of DNA in all organisms

Viruses

Viruses mutate very fast, our immune system cannot keep up to detect, develop immune response and defend our healthy cells

H1N1, has an enzyme called Reverse Transcriptase that makes errors naturally, mutates quickly as it spreads

Vaccines

Polio and small pox were eliminated using vaccines

Target of this technology is to eradicate: Influenza virus causes 35,000 USA deaths

annuallyHIV Hepatitis B VirusHuman T Cell Lymphocyte Virus

Example of Startup

MolecularBreeding™ Technology DNA Shuffling leads to high throughput screening

to rapidly identify antigens with the potential to provide protection against various diseases

Big benefit is technology is universal to all viruses, bigger piece of market pie

Market Annual Vaccine Market $25.8B annualy Growing at a rate of 31.8% annually

Benefits of this technology

Most viruses are live attenuated viruses, meaning you are get a piece of a live virus, develop immunity and thus a defense against the virus for life; or a killed pathogen

However, these methods have not worked for vaccine development with HIV, Hep B, H1N1, etc

Our screening: robust, fast, rapid screening of potential vaccines; we use Viruses abilities of “stealth mode” to deliver the vaccine

Potential of Biotech

DNA Vaccine technology can keep up with viral mutations, and prevent a pandemic

Green TechnologyReduce dependency on foreign petroleum

Field is really only 20 years old, nascent technologies need to be refined but potential is great