To celebrate 30 years of the biotechnology industry, analysts Ernst & Young asked five leaders from academia, industry and government to forecast the sector's future. Three of the five predict that solving health and nutrition problems in the developing world will create an opportunity for investment and jobs

To feed the world's growing population, agriculture over the next 20 years will have to double its production from the same amount of land, says Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the 'father' of the green revolution. Two approaches can help, he says: continue to work on 'producer-oriented' traits, such as tolerance to temperatures and drought, and do more work to genetically modify plants to improve their nutritional and health benefits.

As well as nutrition problems, developing countries must deal with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Public–private partnerships are now pouring money into this problem, says Victoria Hale, chief executive of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a non-profit pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, California. But more needs to be done to make biotech products that can control these diseases available to the poor. This is a great challenge for young scientists — assuming that the funding materializes.

Finally, as countries develop, they may fall prey to the downsides of Western progress: “the diseases of a richer society”, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, says David Weatherall of the University of Oxford. Drugs already exist in the West to treat these diseases, but costs need to come down to make them accessible to the developing world. And better, cheaper diagnostics will help physicians tackle the conditions earlier and with better targeted drugs in all parts of the world, says Weatherall.

These three challenges could lead to more funding and jobs, but that depends on the developed countries choosing to address the problems — and convincing them to do just that is perhaps the biggest challenge of all.