[Pharmaceutical biotechnologies: drawing out the genome to develop, improve and personalize therapies and patient care]

Abstract

Thanks to high-throughput sequencing with technologies, which allow the reading of more than 100 million bases in one day with reduced cost, our knowledge about prokaryotic, eukaryotic and viral genomes has significantly increased since the 2000s. The multiplication of genetic engineering tools including DNA polymerases, restriction enzymes and genome editing enzymes and the development of other "omic" technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, have allowed pharmaceutical biotechnologies to favor the identification and validation of various diagnostic and therapeutic targets underlying the development of targeted therapies. Indeed, these advances have supported a better understanding of pathologies as well as an improvement in their diagnosis, through the identification of biomarkers, considerably favoring more personalized and more efficient patients' care. The orientation towards more targeted treatments was initiated by the development of recombinant proteins, and more recently monoclonal antibodies, which can block protein functions and/or modulate immune responses. Gene therapy is also promising, by inserting a gene into patients' cells to overcome rare diseases and autologous or heterologous cell-based therapies are also under development. Although their history is recent, pharmaceutical biotechnologies are evolving rapidly and offer exciting prospects at the dawn of precision medicine.

Keywords: biotechnologies pharmaceutiques; genetic engineering; génie génétique; high-throughput sequencing; médecine de précision; pharmaceutical biotechnology; precision medicine; séquençage à haut débit; targeted therapies; thérapies ciblées.