Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
commercialization does not happen in a vacuum and that cultural
values, government intervention, scientific and in-country
technological capacity and a myriad of other factors affecting the
flow of people, resources and money locally and across borders
will impact on the success of any new product entering into the
global bioeconomy.
1.1
Modelling the most successful biotech business in
the world
One of the keys to unlocking the success of new developments in the
stem cell sciences lies in identifying how they map onto existing
markets. As new biotechnological products, emerging stem cell
therapies are a subsidiary of the global biotechnology industry. With
its roots in developments in agriculture and animal husbandry in the
early twentieth century, the first modern biotechnology product to
sell successfully was a recombinant DNA artefact developed by the
US-based company Genentech in 1978. Since the late 1970s, the
biotech industry has developed at an exponential rate, although
industry analysts Ernst & Young (2008) have highlighted that
biotechnology only started to return a profit worldwide more than
30 years later. Nevertheless, they report that post-financial crisis the
global biotechnology industry in the established centres around the
world (that is the US, Europe, Canada and Australia) is worth nearly
US$80 billion annually (Ernst & Young, 2010). Emerging markets
in India, China, Japan and Singapore are expected to add even more
to this revenue stream in coming years (Ernst & Young, 2010).
The US biotech industry is far and away the world's largest and so
far most productive. In 2009 for instance, the US biotechnology
revenue stream for publicly traded biotechnology companies was
US$56.6 billion (Ernst & Young, 2010). Notably, this figure includes
the loss incurred by the buyout of Genentech by European
pharmaceutical company Roche (Ernst & Young, 2010). In Europe,
by contrast, the revenue raised by publicly traded biotechnology
companies was around
€
11.9 billion in 2009. In comparison, in
Canada and Australia for 2009, revenues were US$2.2 billion and
