The New Era of Life Sciences 2025 Edition : The Future is Now

We get a tangible sense of progress as we hear from key figures in the industry. Debbie Hart, President of BioNJ, the life sciences trade association for New Jersey, shared how the state is now at the forefront of cell and gene therapy. One example she cites is Cellares, which, with its state-of-the-art smart factory already established in New Jersey, recently secured a crucial FDA Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation for its cell therapy manufacturing platform, which can greatly improve access to these treatments. On the West Coast, Joe Panetta, who stepped down in December 2024 after 25 years at the helm of Biocom California, looks back with fulfillment as his organization was key for the transformation of California into a global biotech hub. Simply considering Amgen’s breakthrough last year in the treatment of lung cancer, or Gilead’s strides in HIV should suffice to convince the reader of California’s significance for global health.

Taken together, the examples of New Jersey and California convey an important message’. Much of the discourse around life sciences may appear to have a futuristic streak. We will cure this or that terrible disease. We will live to a hundred. We will come up with a cheap, miraculous medicine. The future tense can be tiring – for us journalists, but most of all for patients, whose distress is very much contemporary. Yet, stories like the ones we tell in this edition must serve to highlight the enormous progress that the industry is making – not in five or ten years, but today.