The Impact of Israeli Startups on Global Advances in Biotech
Though the global biotech industry has been on a steady rise since its inception, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the research and use of biotechnology. Now, both companies and governments are relying on biotech in the hopes of finding new answers to key global concerns such as disease, food shortages, environmental degradation, and much more.
While the majority of the industry’s attention is still on medicine, entrepreneurs are developing solutions for everything from environmental surveillance to food materials. This has led to phenomenal growth in the biotech industry as experts estimate that the global value of the industry may rise to $775 billion by 2024.
The latest prevalent biotech trends
Biotechnology is currently evolving on a global scale. Big data, personalized medicine, pharmacological research, and artificial intelligence are among the most significant recent biotech trends. Identifying and recognizing these technology trends can help organizations benefit from the industry’s huge growth potential.
Big Data: The incorporation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors, has resulted in a massive quantity of data becoming accessible. Biotechnology companies can use analytics and big data technologies to leverage this abundance of data and accelerate innovation. Bioinformatics solutions are used by startups and businesses to produce better quality feed, enhance agricultural and animal variations, identify new microorganisms, and much more.
Personalized Medicine: By allowing the development of custom solutions, personalized medicine allows physicians to specifically cater to their patients. Healthcare practitioners can use personalized biotechnology to evaluate genetics to detect medical concerns in their patients. Doctors generate unique, customized health treatments by focusing medical innovation on genetic sequencing. All these have led to both time and cost savings besides invaluable better outcomes.
Another advantage of personalized medicine is how it makes use of data gathered from screening clinical trials, allowing medical experts to build individualized treatments and therapies based on those findings. Personalized therapy is beneficial for general treatment since it pinpoints the root cause of most medical issues: the patient’s genetic and molecular makeup.
Pharmaceutical Research: Because of advances in smart technology, pharmaceutical research is one of the most exciting biotech developments. Traditionally, medical research has labored to recruit sufficient individuals for trials and has faced protracted production delays that sometimes last years. Machine learning technology opens up a world of possibilities for pharmaceutical research, along with techniques to improve and analyze medicine diagnosis and therapy.
Biotechnology shortens medication development schedules without requiring pharmaceuticals to recruit thousands of people to participate in clinical trials. Data from current studies and data from earlier trials can be analyzed efficiently by biotech startups. This research, as well as the capacity to aggregate large datasets, provides the information needed to make more accurate diagnoses and, consequently, to develop better medications and treatment options for patients.
Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence (AI) has a wide range of uses in virtually every industry, and biotech isn’t an exception. AI has been used by biotech startups to improve the automation of a number of fundamental operations. AI can, for example, find biomarkers that might be used in the creation of medications and diagnostics.
Image classification can also be used by AI systems to detect features of human illnesses like cancer cells, as well as crop diseases like leaf coloring and decay. Phenotype screening and microbiome assessment are two additional biotech uses of artificial intelligence.
Israeli startups headlining global biotech innovations
Israel has quite a large pool of startups with huge potential in biotech and has been recognized as a global leader in the scientific research institution. The Middle Eastern nation boasts the largest proportion of engineers and the largest number of physicians per capita in the world. Biotechnology accounts for more than one-quarter of the country’s life science scene with more than 470 active biotech firms, employing thousands of high-skilled workers.
One of these startups was launched in 2017 by its shareholders on the foundation of Bristol-Myers Squibb IP rights. This startup created a patented analytic approach for analyzing next-generation sequencing data and identifying individuals that have Notch as a tumorigenic driver and may benefit from GSI therapy. They use big data analysis to find and identify individuals with Notch-activating mutations who might have some sensitivities to GSIs.
Invasive plants and Herbicide-resistant weeds are being combated with a new technology developed by another Israeli startup. By deploying this new tech, the startup offers crop preservation on a worldwide scale, driven and guided by natural plant processes.
This proposed technology promises to address one of the most pressing issues in crop protection today. As over 250 weeds and invasive plant species develop resistance to more than 150 herbicides now in use, unique approaches to address the demands of a rising global population are needed.
Another startup is a biopharmaceutical firm that creates, produces, and sells new, cost-effective tissue repair and regeneration products. The startup’s approach is based on their enzymatic technology platform, which is focused on developing next-generation bioactive therapeutic solutions for burn, wound, and tissue healing. One of their products is a bromelain-based biological solution containing a sterile mixture of proteolytic enzymes which selectively eliminates burn eschar in under four hours without damaging encompassing viable tissue.
Driving Israeli innovation in biotech
Biotech promises many improvements and changes in the food, health, industrial, and agricultural sectors. As the COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated, timely action is more important than ever in addressing global issues. In Israel’s biotechnology sector, the rate of invention, development, and expansion is unrivaled.
With more startups per capita than any other nation, Israel’s biotech industry is one of the most competitive on the planet. Hundreds of biotech companies, each founded on a foundation of academic excellence, a talented workforce, revolutionary technological innovation, and entrepreneurial ambitiousness, are developing synthetic biology solutions, biomanufacturing tools, and gene-editing techniques that benefit people all over the world.
