The technology can change the pharmaceutical industry: the RNA interference
The traditional pharmaceutical industry is based on a simple principle: to discover the called "magic bullets" that can cure disease or relieve symptoms. For years it was a search industry by trial and error: a chemical is tested to see if it worked. If you did not work, try the following. Many of these compounds were artificial dyes, drugs or natural compounds and plant extracts. Drugs were sought blindly. This paradigm completely monopolized primitive medicine to biotechnology was invented with the founding of the first biotechnology company, Genentech.
Genentech investors are rich today, the investment multiplied by 100 in 15 years, so today would be 10mil euros one million euros. The idea of Genentech and other Biotechs early as Amgen, was to take human proteins, whose function was known, produced industrially and used as drugs.
The patient was cured with substances that were not artificial, such as plant extracts, but with substances produced by the human body and in which the patient was deficient. The first medicines were based on growth hormone, insulin or interferon, antibodies and other proteins.
It had the advantage that would not be so blindly. That is why biotechnology has saved many lives and become billionaires many investors. But biotechnology has a limitation: only proteins could act outside of cells, primarily in the bloodstream.