Probably you are familiar with biotech (especially if you have found your way to this blog!), but what about integration? Well, there are a lot of potential definitions:
- you might be interested in understanding the strength of Apple’s technology through their tight use of vertical integration.
- or you might be more interested in all-engulfing business strategies that swallow up competitors through horizontal integration.
- or maybe you just want to do the opposite of mathematical differentiation.
Here we are mainly talking about a different definition. We like to see biotech as a complex system with many parts. For a biotech business to be successful these different parts have to be pulled together. This is closer to the way systems engineers talk about integration.
So why is that so important? Well, biology has gone through its great reductionist phase; we understand the basic building blocks pretty well now. The next step is to combine those building blocks into new things and start thinking of biology more as an engineering discipline. This is the basic underlying principle that synthetic biology companies such as Twist Bioscience and Evonetix make use of in their platforms (incidentally, both are great examples of vertically integrated platforms).
We will return to synthetic biology in future blog posts as its the industry I work in and have the most first-hand experience of. For interested readers I can wholly recommend Biobuilder, which gives a great overview of how we can apply the tools of engineering to biological systems.
This is an exciting time for synthetic biology; it is going through a period of expansion equivalent to what the 80’s were for personal computers.