Panel - Bytes of life: redefining collaboration to digitize biology

The pharmaceutical industry grapples with skyrocketing drug development costs, exacerbated by a 60-90% failure rate in clinical trials for drugs that initially pass animal testing. The quest for improved pre-clinical models, mirroring human disease physiology, emerges as a pivotal solution to enhance drug development pipeline efficiency and mitigate costs. This challenge intersects with the bioconvergence revolution, where deep technology and fundamental biology merge, promising the true digitization of biology, predicted by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang to be "flat out the next biggest revolution ever.”

By harnessing nanotechnology, imec pioneers humanized preclinical models, advancing our understanding of diseases like Parkinson's and specialized systems such as the blood-brain-barrier. This approach addresses industry needs for scaling and robustness of these microphysiological systems. 

However, these bioconvergent tools are a means to an end as the true value lies in the otherwise unattainable data-driven insights that these tools will bring to the end-users. Yet, the journey from innovation to end-user adoption faces a funding valley of death. Imec, with its track-record in driving the semiconductor roadmap through running pre-competitive programs, advocates for replicating its efficient collaborative funding model to drive the bioconvergence roadmap, sharing costs and risks, while accelerating the delivery of transformative healthcare solutions.