Biotechnologies

OECD defines the biotechnologies like " the application of science and technology to the living organisms to other or not alive alive materials, for the production of knowing, goods and services."

Biotechnologies, as their name indicates it, result from a marriage between science from the living beings - biology - and a unit from new techniques resulting from other disciplines such as the Microbiologie, the Biochimie, the Biophysique, the Génétique, the Molecular biology, the Informatique…

By abuse language, one often restricts them with the field of the genetic Engineering and with technologies resulting from the Transgenèse, allowing in particular to intervene on the inheritance Génétique of the species to decipher it or modify it (creation of genetically modified organizations - GMO).

Traditional biotechnologies

Vinification
use of Levure S
and all that milked with the Agro-alimentaire or with the Cuisine.

Transgenèse

The purpose of the technologies based on the Transgenèse are creation of new products by:

the decoding of the Genome itself,
genetic modification of organizations already considered as useful for the man, like the Cereal S, in order to give them characteristics which they do not have yet, for example resistance to a vermin,
genetic modification of other organizations, in order to make them useful for the man. For example the creation of Goat S integral in their genome of genes of Spider S in order to be able to extract from their milk of wire usable like Textile.
genetic modification of the Man.

Presentation of the sector

Biotechnologies play a big role in the sector of industries of the Santé, but have also an emergent role in the sectors of the Environnement, of the Agriculture, the Agro-alimentaire, like for the development of innovating industrial processes.

In the sector of health, the discovery of new treatments calls more and more upon biotechnologies to seek the causes of the diseases, to design, test and produce specific drugs. This supposes a very great research effort to include/understand the operation of the organizations, and to design drugs able to act on possible disturbances.

This research effort is externalisé more and more by the pharmaceutical companies towards the companies of biotechnology. This externalisation of the R & D makes it possible to have access to more diversified offer of end products, i.e. candidates drugs for whom the proof of concept (test tube experiments and/or in cellular culture), the proof of feasibility (tests in the animal), even the clinical evaluation at the man were already made. The effective presence of a fabric of young innovating companies of biotechnology is thus a source of major innovations for the pharmaceutical sector. Thus, currently 15% of the new drugs result from biotechnologies and projections change this figure to 40% per 2010.

Beyond the pharmaceutical sector, biotechnologies play an increasingly important part in the Bio-industry, the fields of the environment and agronomy. Biotechnologies can allow the settling of sensors of the state of the environment, of its pollution by chemical substances. They can be used with the development as innovating processes of recycling. The genetically modified organizations can be used to produce innovating materials, of chemical substances, very difficult or very expensive to obtain by traditional chemistry.

The development of biotechnologies in the field of agriculture, with through in particular of GMO raises many polemics, on the level of certain professional bodies farmers (like the Peasant confederation in France) and of the ONG like Greenpeace or the Amis of Nature. Association Inf' GMO follows the topicality in this field in order to feed the public debate.

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