Alex Philippidis Senior News Editor Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
These technologies showed much promise at the start, but have yet to deliver.
There’s no argument that biotechnology has dramatically improved global healthcare with the introduction of many novel biotherapeutics. A few examples include Enbrel for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis; Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; Herceptin for breast cancer; Humulin for diabetes; Procrit for the treatment of anemia in patients with kidney failure, HIV, or cancer; and Avastin for metastatic colorectal cancer, advanced nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer, metastatic kidney cancer, and glioblastoma.
But along the way there have been some huge hopes for a number of other novel drug products and innovative technologies. For various reasons—they did not work as well as first thought or the market did not develop to the degree as had been expected—neither these products nor technologies have come to fruition. Here is GEN’s listing of ten biotechnologies that have yet to live up to the hype.
- Antisense
- Anti-sepsis drugs
- Artificial blood substitutes
- Bioremediation
- HIV Vaccines
- Interleukin 2
- Novel antibiotic agents
- Neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorder therapeutics
- Transgenic-animal-produced therapies
- Xenotransplantation
