Enter The New Era of Biotechnology

Dear Colleague,

This year has been a truly fascinating time in the biotechnology industry. We have witnessed some remarkable scientific achievements that offer great potentials in broadening our understanding of fundamental biological processes. We have new revelations, bringing to light considerable flaws in the way in which genes have been identified, thus questioning the traditional view of our genetic makeup and reshaping our understandings of genomic functions.

We have also seen scientists uncovering the genetics behind some of the most common and complex diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and coronary heart disease, information which will no doubt enhance our understanding of how disease occur and in time aid in the development of more personalized medicines. Another key advancement is the development of the first complete picture of how anthrax-causing bacteria survive and grow inside immune cells during the first moments of anthrax infection – information which could prove vital in the case of a bioterrorist attack.

Such discoveries have made the task even more immense for manufacturers of R&D instrumentation and informatics software, pressing them to bring to market an even greater array of products and services to further enhance our understanding of biological and disease processes. We have seen many companies already rising to this ever increasing challenge, with the field of systems biology, combined with various computational tools, playing a crucial role in the future of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors in accelerating drug delivery to market.

With the above developments, 2007 was an important year for key collaborations and mergers amongst industry leading firms, aiming to enhance interoperability of their products and services in order to push the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industries to a whole new level. This was a prominent trend in 2006 and this year proved no different. Thus, one expects the investment ball will continue to roll in years to come particularly with the emergence of new biotechnology super powers, namely India and China. 2008 will be the year where east and west will join forces in key biotechnology and pharmaceutical research collaborations, with the World Wide Web playing an important role through semantic web applications.

The Power of Web 2.0
2008 will be an exciting year for OBBeC as we are dramatically expanding our presence in the biotechnology business and computing markets worldwide through our brand new, and redesigned, OBBeC® Portal (code named OBBeC 2.0). OBBeC is a platform through which the elite of today’s biotechnology industry share and retrieve latest industrial and product information, business leads, investment opportunities and much more, all through its Web 2.0 capabilities. We would like to welcome you to our network and we look forward to working with you in 2008.

Best wishes

Teacha Hamilton BSc (Honours), Msc
Editorial Director