Deloitte: BioTech set to Revolutionise Healthcare
A Deloitte report highlights BioTech as an area of huge potential for future business strategies.
Following its inaugural 2023 xTech Futures report – which looked at space technologies – the 2024 edition explores biotechnologies, and how these can “help more players revolutionise healthcare, leapfrog the competition and restore the planet”.
Deloitte says that biotechnologies are “more relevant to a broad spectrum of organisations than they may appear to be at first glance”.
It adds that the biotech revolution is “currently brewing, largely unnoticed”, but that it is “poised to create a significant shift similar to the shift of computation from analogue to digital”.
Deloitte's report spotlights how life sciences, healthcare services, consumer products and sustainable agriculture are primed to see the benefits of biotechnologies. Deloitte says its report is designed to help organisations “make sense of this change and pinpoint areas to play in based on their specific goals”.
The report details way biotechnology can help humanity, by:
- Helping patients avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor
- Providing more accurate health data to inform patients
- Increasing the speed of drug discovery
- Making drugs safer by avoiding off-target issues and development liabilities
- Helping humankind grow more food
- Protecting the planet from the effects of mass agriculture
- Speeding and scaling the creation of products and packages that use circular materials.
Biotech landscape has expanded - Deloitte
xTech Futures 2024 details how the to include a wide array of innovations, including rapidly engineered life-saving therapeutics, ecological replacements for traditional textiles and biological enzymes that dissolve plastic waste.
The report also warns that the solution to serious global issues – from climate change and global health crises to food insecurity and resource scarcity – “may lie in our ability to leverage biotech effectively and responsibly, working with nature instead of against it”.
Report co-author Mike Bechtel – Deloitte Chief Futurist & MD says: "It's intuitive that biotechnology innovations figure to improve both the quality and span of human life.
“Less obvious, but equally compelling, is biotech's potential to radically improve product manufacturing and the health of the planet. “Increasingly, the most important cues we can take and build upon are the ones nature has already established. We're evolving from manipulating nature to emulating it."
Fellow co-author Raquel Buscaino – US Novel & Exponential Technologies Lead – says that biotechnology “isn't just about building with biology, but about bringing humanity back in sync with nature”.
She adds: “Since the Industrial Revolution, so much of humanity's progress has been made at nature's expense.
“Now, instead of depleting the natural world, we can learn from and create with it, ushering in a new era where both prosperity and the planet can coexist."