This date commemorates the US Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling that a genetically modified bacterium was patentable.
Biotechnology is a success story of collaboration between research and industry, turning laboratory breakthroughs into solutions that are already improving the lives of millions of people. This includes gene therapies and RNA vaccines developed in record time, as well as applications in bioremediation, the industrial production of molecules and the improvement of agricultural soils.
Many major milestones have been reached in the last 20 years, but there are still many more to come, such as the search for and synthesis of new antibiotics and the decarbonisation of industry.
- 2006: iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells). Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka discovered that somatic cells could be ‘reprogrammed’ using a combination of transcription factors, known as the ‘Yamanaka cocktail’.
- 2010: First synthetic cell (JCVI-syn1.0).
- 2012: CRISPR-Cas9, for which Charpentier and Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, Francisco J. Mojica (University of Alicante) coined and popularised the term CRISPR, identifying and characterising these regions, thus laying the foundations for the subsequent ‘CRISPR-Cas9 molecular scissors’ tool.
- 2013–2014: Organs-on-chips and organoids: 3D models that accelerate drug discovery and reduce the need for animal experimentation.
- 2017: The first CAR-T therapies are approved. The era of personalised immunotherapy begins.
- 2020: mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.
- 2022–2024: Base and prime editing: versions of CRISPR that correct specific DNA sequences without creating double-strand breaks.
Omics techniques are a fundamental tool for studying the great variability of matrices, factors, molecules and possibilities of biological systems. Behind every landmark there are thousands of gigabytes of genomes, proteomes, metabolomes, metagenomes… and the use of omics allows us to understand, predict and map a biological system.
At Microomics Systems we work to facilitate the use of omics as a tool in research, clinical and industrial development projects. Data integration and analysis is the only way to be able to establish correlations and patterns on which to make decisions. And that data must be free of methodological bias.
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