Biotech just isn’t resonating with the “cool kids” at South By Southwest this year, or so said Luke Timmerman in a new piece for Forbes. Biotech nerds are not the cool kinds of nerds, he says. Lives are saved, sure – but a cystic fibrosis cure just happens to be less sexy than an iPhone.
The esoteric science of biotechnology is more suited for an investor base than a consumer audience, Timmerman writes. When you see a “rolling bar, beer on tap, being powered down the street by a dozen people on stationary bikes” – well, it’s not necessarily the right time to process the complexities of next-generation sequencing. He says:
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Big swaths of the tech industry are about marketing to the consumer masses. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies, with the exception of things like Viagra or that drug for toenail fungus advertised in the Super Bowl, don’t usually promote their products to a mass consumer audience. Many in biotech consider such marketing crass. They aim their messages at elite investors, elite physicians and highly educated audiences at the FDA and at insurance companies.
Also the buzzing tech scene at SXSW isn’t exactly patient for the long validation process required in the biosciences:
This slow, cautious approach goes against the grain of move-fast-and-break stuff tech culture. If you’re Uber, you see yourself changing the world of transportation. If you need to run over a few regulators along the way, so be it. Medicine can’t be that cavalier. Since lives are at stake, you can’t run around half-cocked and potentially cause more harm than good. Healthcare certainly needs entrepreneurial disruption in many respects, but there’s just no way to steamroll through it with one cool data-driven app.