Opinion: The Covid-19 pandemic could mark the beginning of the ‘biotech century’
If you had infinite foresight and knew a pathogen like Covid-19 was coming, what would you do to prepare? You’d certainly stockpile N95 masks and ventilators. But you’d also invest billions of dollars, or perhaps even trillions, in biopharma research and development to get ready to fight back.
The latter is exactly what we have done. Since 1995, businesses and government agencies have spent almost $2 trillion on health-related R&D in the United States alone. From that spending has come a series of scientific and medical successes, including the sequencing of the human genome, the taming of HIV, a cure for hepatitis C, the slow rollout of gene therapies, immunotherapy for cancer, and more.
