Your note about FDA approvals rings true. It can take a very very long time for things to progress to the stage where they're available for sale - particularly when it comes to the medical industry. I've been watching a company that's been able to dramatically speed up the detection of things like Tuberculosis (from 21 days to 4 days), E.Coli (from up to 24 hours down to 4 hours), MRSA (up to 24 hours down to 6 hours), etc. ... and they've made what I consider to be remarkable advancements. Yet they haven't yet received the FDA approval necessary to achieve wider adoption of their technology.
To get silicon valley, or other investors to see the opportunity to back these types of ventures the approval process needs to be streamlined and prioritized in a way that accelerates the time-to-market for technologies that stand to benefit society on the whole.
it isn't only FDA per.se. The financial aspects of biomedical R&D is very peculiar. Different time - first half of 199x, different country - recently post-Soviet Russia, different scale of money ... i was involved in the project to secure financing (high tens of thousands of dollars, the project would have become profitable at the 3rd, possibly 2nd year - too long of a shot in the environment where trading in metals, vodka or electronics would bring 50-100% scale profits on the first turnaround, ie. on weeks, rare few months, time scale) for productization of some wonderful technology developed by a leading brain science institution. Well, we failed.
These days, with all the supposed and expected high/bio-tech boom and the marvelous advancements just around the corner, we see biotech layoffs, and a couple of PhD degreed with years of experience biomedical professionals i personally know here in the Valley can't get a job even at half what i'm making in the software. One of the reasons of such a state is that financing of the industry requires bigger scale, amount- and time-wise, of money, and thus is coming from banks and other institutions who have significantly decreased imnvestments following 2008. Talking about stimulus and the dirty cheap Federal money the banks have access to - it just isn't trickling down as lazily pumping the money though treasuries and QEs is much more safe way to profit from the money.
http://nanologix.com/test_results.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38404/
To get silicon valley, or other investors to see the opportunity to back these types of ventures the approval process needs to be streamlined and prioritized in a way that accelerates the time-to-market for technologies that stand to benefit society on the whole.