Every February, we bring Benchling together in San Francisco to kick off a new year. The stakes felt different this year. Capital constraints are forcing biotechs to think differently. China's accelerating scientific capabilities are raising the bar on speed and cost. The industry needs a breakthrough – and I believe it will come from technology.
Consider this: In 2024, the FDA approved 50 new medicines. While many are remarkable and life saving, this number has remained stagnant for a decade even as R&D costs have soared.
Other complex industries faced similar scaling challenges and conquered them. In the same decade, battery costs dropped 80% catalyzing 10x growth in EV sales and computing power doubled every two years, enabling breakthroughs like self-driving cars and ChatGPT.
Biotech is overdue for its own industrialization. While biology is messy and constrained by the slow and manual nature of experimentation, it is still fundamentally knowledge work. Exponential advances in AI – the cost of GPT-4 level intelligence is 1000x cheaper than 18 months ago – are a huge opportunity to accelerate scientific progress.
At Benchling, we've spent a decade helping R&D teams build the foundation: centralizing and structuring their scientific data. Now, we are turning our attention to helping them leverage that foundation to generate 10x more high-quality molecules and automate critical R&D steps, dramatically reducing costs.
Other technical industries are already benefitting and biotech should aim just as high. I’m looking forward to the year ahead and helping the biopharma industry build a future where not 50, but 500 new medicines are approved every year.
