The goal of biotechnology or any biotech company aims to improve the lives and health of all living things (plants and animals). They exploit cellular and biomolecular activities in specimens (plants or animals).
Every biotech company has 3 building blocks. They include the technology or product solving a challenge, the operational model that builds a business around this technology, and core values driving the business and employees.
This guide explains a biotech company, its modus operandi, and various areas of specialization.
What is a Biotech Company?
A biotech company is a company that studies living organisms and their by-products such as bacteria and enzymes. They use this knowledge to create drugs and other products to improve plants, and human and animal lives.
In essence, these companies can exist to study and improve agriculture, environment safety, industry technology, and forensic investigations.
What Does a Biotech Company Do?
Biotech companies study the inner workings of DNA and biological processes such as how DNA structures form and develop in their early stages, how organisms interact with each other, and how they can benefit living things and plants.
To better understand this concept, let’s take a look at the series of processes that result in the production of alcohol:
- Water and barley are mixed and mashed together to create wort – a sugary liquid.
- Add some yeast to this mixture. Yeast is unicellular fungi capable of eating sugar once they come in contact with it. Their role in this mixture is to react with the sugar in the wort and create waste products (precisely alcohol and carbon dioxide) required to make beer.
- To give alcohol or beer its primary taste, Hops – a flower from the Humulus lupulus plant. This plant contains high levels of alpha and beta acids responsible for impeding the growth of gram-positive bacteria during fermentation.
In essence, bacteria and enzymes are of the utmost importance to biotech companies. These byproducts are then refined into plant food, drugs, pesticide, and biofuels, just to name a few.
Fields of Biotechnology
When creating a biotech company, it is best to specialize in a particular field. This is why most biotechnology companies are either producing solutions helpful in:
1. Medicine
A biotech company that primarily specializes in medicine studies living cells for the production of drugs, vaccines, and other forms of treatments. They also research why some medical conditions such as cancer develop and adapt within living organisms.
2. Agriculture
If a biotech company specializes in agriculture, its primary duty is to study crops and livestock modification. This may require genetic engineering, cross-breeding, flavor markers, and other products to improve lifespan and productivity.
In animals, this usually involves modifying or amplifying desirable traits such as temperament, size, overall health, and obedience.
3. Industrial biotechnology
Some biotech companies focus on helping industries develop better systems and materials. Most biofuels and bioplastics that replace unsustainable materials are thanks to such companies.
4. Environmental science
Biotech companies are structures designed to improve the environment. Most living organisms undergo a general life cycle which is to ingest nutrients and excrete waste material.
Unfortunately, humans are the primary culprit of environmental toxicity. This boils down to improper waste disposal. Biotech companies in the environmental space help with the provision of recycling stations for reactive waste products and the production of environment-friendly materials.
FAQs
What is an example of a biotechnology company?
Examples of biotechnology companies include Novo Nordisk, Moderna, Amgen, and Biogen.
These companies undergo lengthy trials to produce effective solutions.
How do biotech companies make money?
Biotech companies make money from selling their products to consumers.
They also sell stocks to investors guaranteeing them a percentage increase at agreed intervals.
Which country has the best biotech companies?
Countries like the United States, China, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are top countries when it comes to biotechnology.
Conclusion
Biotechnology is a field that continues to positively impact crucial areas of human civilization, plant, and animal development. Their companies provide a variety of applications or solutions thanks to continuous research and experimentation.
For example, as simple as the brewing process of alcohol is, scientists did not stop there. They took a step forward by including the option of adding different flavors. The same can be said for cancer drugs that can be modified to suit the genetic information of different patients for effective treatment.
Hence, if there is one field that guarantees continuous growth and discovery, it is biotechnology.
I hope you found this guide helpful. Perhaps you are interested in starting a biotech company, here are the steps you need to take to create a startup.
Thanks for reading.
