5 biotech trends I'm excited about in 2018

Posted by Matt Pavlovich | Published January 23, 2018, 09:00

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Over the past year, I've thought a lot about what different people mean by biotechnology and what a
biotech reviews journal ought to cover. Now that we've reached a useful definition, what parts of that heat
map seem poised to get even hotter over the next year?

Here are a few areas I'll be paying attention to in 2018.

1. Bacterial communities
We've all heard about the human microbiome and how it secretly controls everything about us. The idea
behind various microbiota is that many microbes cultured together are more than the sum of their parts,
whether in the human gut, a bottle of kombucha, or even an industrial bioreactor. We've been using single
microorganisms—typically baker's yeast or non-infectious strains of E. coli—to produce specialty
chemicals and pharmaceuticals for decades, though biomolecular engineers are starting to take
advantage of synergistic relationships among certain microbes to process chemicals faster, more
thoroughly, or under milder conditions.

But bacterial communities can be exploited to do interesting things beyond just industrial processing. For
example, hydrocarbon-eating bacteria exist in complex structured networks that can be deployed
strategically to clean up oil spills. And microbial interactions have even been pondered as trace evidence
in forensics based on the idea that changes in the composition of a person's skin microbial population
could help locate a suspect in time and space at the moment when a crime took place.

2. Natural products and plant synthetic biology

Chinese traditional medicine has become an unlikely breakout star of the analytical chemistry world over
the past few years. Now that we have the tools to analyze biological samples quickly and efficiently, there
is a new wealth of scientific support for the efficacy of traditional therapies derived from so-called natural
products, often either plants or fungi that have been historically associated with medicinal effects. Once
scientists understand the molecular basis for a natural product's efficacy, it becomes much easier to
synthesize these products in a controlled and regulated bioprocess.

And just as it's now routine to create designer microbes to catalyze chemical transformations, the next
frontier in synthetic biology might be rationally designed higher fungi and plants. Even my old chemical
engineering department at UC Berkeley has subtly shifted away from biofuels and toward "bionic plants"
and natural product biosynthesis. After all, if we can engineer yeast to produce proteins, why not anti-
cancer vaccines from lettuce or rice?

3. Clinical biofabrication
Last night, an acquaintance of mine named Ron asked me if I was doing anything interesting at work. Yes,
I told him, I was working on a special issue on tissue engineering. Ron is not a scientist, so I expected his
interest to stop there. Instead, his eyes lit up when I explained biofabrication, and I proceeded to have one
of the unlikeliest five-minute conversations on bioprinted organs that I can remember. It turns out that his
father was recently diagnosed with kidney disease and wanted to know how close we were to being able
to fabricate a biosynthetic kidney and implant it in humans.

I'm not sure if Ron knew how good of a question he asked. "Unfortunately, at least a few years away" was
the best answer I could come up with. The recent advances in the field have been enormous: in a span of
only ten years, we've gone from 3D printers being idle curiosities in university libraries and toys for
entrepreneurs to crank out rapid prototypes to having more than a dozen strategies for recapitulating
human organ geometry and function. Yet the translation problem remains firmly in the minds of everyone
working in the field: while fabricated liver systems for drug screening, microfluidic dialysis-on-a-chip, and a
bioprinted pancreas are firmly within reach, actually implementing these technologies in humans is going
to require thinking critically about immunocompatibility, cost-effectiveness, and fabrication reproducibility
—not to mention inevitable challenges with regulation and public communication.

4. Smarter bioelectronics and biosensors

On a biophysics level, the brain is just a collection of electrical impulses connected by a neural network,
so we should be able to sort out what does what and create our own brain interfaces, right? (Trends in
Neurosciences editor Moran Furman is probably laughing out loud right now, and for good reason.) This is
obviously fanciful and a vast oversimplification, but a concrete trend in this field is a move toward in vivo
sensors—with the distinctly transhuman idea of higher-order cognitive brain-signal processing lurking on
the horizon.

The idea of biosensors is nothing new: we have long appropriated biology in the form of affinity from the
immune system, enzymes from bacteria, and fluorescence from exotic sea creatures and combined them
into devices that can tell you if you have biomarkers associated with neurodegenerative disease or
chikungunya. But as computational processing power continues to rise exponentially, detection arrays
continue to shrink in size, and the internet of things contains more and more things, we might be able to
conceive of wearable and even implantable sensors. This idea can apply to smart bandages, too: think of
a wound dressing that monitors your infection risk in real time and releases extra antiseptics when it gets
too high.
5. Bioenergy solutions
Biofuels aren't going anywhere, but I've sensed a definite shift in enthusiasm away from processing land
plants into fuel. What's exciting now? Algae certainly remain relevant, but we're as far as ever from building
an industrial-scale algae refinery next to every pond. Economics play an important role here: according to
some analyses, the thing that makes algae bioprocessing economically sustainable isn't fuel, it's pigments.
So if algae are the field's preferred energy solution, it will be important to take advantage of as many
algae-derived products as possible, potentially through clever genetic manipulation.

Another promising idea is electro-fermentation, in which microbes (or communities thereof!) acquire
electrons from metal surfaces and use the electrons to perform otherwise impossible reactions—like
converting atmospheric carbon dioxide to useful compounds, including back into fuel.

As always, I'd love to hear your comments: what biotech trends are you most excited about for 2018 and
beyond?

Posted by

Matt Pavlovich
Matt is the editor of Trends in Biotechnology, Cell Press's home for reviews in the applied biological
sciences. His background is not so secretly in engineering rather than biology, but he hopes you won't
 hold that against him. He can often be found crafting and enjoying fine beverages (which is definitely
biotechnology) and blogging about strategy game design (which is surprisingly similar to managing a
reviews journal).

Filed to Trends in Biotechnology

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