This book explores the next decade’s more frequent and intense economic, geopolitical, fiscal, and market volatility, technological innovation, disruption, and hype.
Long-term opportunity exists, and this book uses a 10-year horizon as a surrogate for a long-term perspective. Some of the world’s most important industries are being disrupted, especially finance via digital assets and Blockchain-based businesses, life sciences via gene editing, DNA sequencing, and CRISPR, and communications via advanced wireless data networks, software technologies including artificial intelligence, and new interactive platforms such as the Metaverse.
While messenger RNA (mRNA) has been catching recent headlines thanks to its ability to fight Covid, the combination of a global pandemic and the miraculous mRNA vaccine development in less than one year (when typical timelines approach 10 years) has made mRNA life science’s overnight sensation even though the underlying scientific knowledge is based on discoveries from over 20 years ago.
Still, mRNA has the promise to disrupt life sciences and drug development and create enormous economic value. There are fantastic fortunes to be made in mRNA technology. Moderna and BioNTech have created over $100 billion of value collectively, as of February 2022. That kind of value creation will not be ignored by a combination of firms within an industry with hundreds of billions to invest.
There will be an incredible future of development, capital availability, and industry focus until all potential options are exhausted. But, mRNA has a fantastic future, even if it ultimately lives only in labs and R&D centers spread around the globe. It will become an area of focus for every major pharmaceutical company and most biotechs in some form from now on.
Investors have been swept up in the notion of “philanthropic capitalism” and have targeted life-sciences as an avenue that can fulfill this benefit to society. While laudable in concept, this is non-scientific surrealism. “Hoped-for” is not a reliable business model, and most of the unrealistic goals would not be sustainable even if achieved. Real science and innovation are more impactful and substantial and make life sciences even more.
