[Disclaimer: I am an employee of Bristol Myers Squibb. The views expressed here are my own.]
One of my favorite questions to ask is: “What captures your imagination?” At a recent family dinner, responses were varied but encouraging for the next generation: black swan events, comparative anatomy & human physiology, space exploration & intelligent life beyond our planet, and more. My response was programmable therapeutics, a topic which I have blogged about in the past.
In this blog I define programmable therapeutics and provide a few recent examples (severe combined immune deficiency and mRNA vaccines). As you will see, programmable therapeutics is more than pure imagination – we are seeing this new concept evolve before our very eyes.
What is the concept of programmable therapeutics?
While there are different definitions of the concept of programmable therapeutics (see a16z talk; programmable cells; synthetic biology; CRISPR base editing), my definition of programmable therapeutics relates to a platform with modular components that can shorten the time from new target to drug candidate and ultimately regulatory trials that can lead to an approved medicine.
For most drug development programs, the identification of a drug target represents the start of a long journey that is highly artisanal.…