Foreword

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While the 20th century was the century of the Atom, the 21st century is the century of DNA. Biotechnology is  therefore offering real opportunities notably in health, consumer, environment, agriculture/food, and fine chemicals and energy areas, while protecting Gaia.

Still, there is a need to accelerate such developments and bring them to market. Though, speed has been improved using hardware platforms (DNA synthesis, robotization, miniaturization for example) to mostly generate massive amounts of data, there is still an opportunity to mine this metadata to create knowledge and generate novel hypothesis. I do believe that proper exercise of high volume biology, systems biology and artificial intelligence/machine learning driven technologies are the new frontier to extract and generate new innovative concepts and solutions. Such systems and mindsets can be adequately deployed to discover and develop the novel generation of medicines and bio-industrial products.

With the growing emergence and the commercial presence of the biotech

industry, there is a need to nurture the new and well-established operations.

Growing from an academic setting to a mature and commercially viable company is no easy task.

Quotes  from the father of Biotechnology, Louis Pasteur:

“Il n’existe pas de sciences appliquees, mais seulement des applications de la science.”

“There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.”

“Il n’existe pas une categorie de sciences auxquelles on puisse donner le nom de sciences appliquees. Il y a la science et les applications de la science, liees entre elles comme le fruit a l’arbre qui l’a porte.”

"There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied sciences. There are sciences and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it."