One thing I have noticed and felt is that there is a very steep energy well that slides you into drug development if your technology is anywhere even near - as drug development has financial returns that are an order of magnitude (or two or three) greater than almost any other problem that bio-technology can be utilized for (right now).
I predict that as the value of those other projects rise, and as the capital required to produce a drug decreases, that those other projects will really start to blossom. And I look forward to it.
They would, but the purchasers of such things are really different. For a drug biotech, you are trying to get to a point in trials where you are acquired by a large pharmaceutical maker, and the large pharmaceutical maker then produces it and uses their distribution network to get it into circulation.
Something like water cleaning goes through really different routes. You may be selling direct to a consumer segment, or to a contractor segment that chooses the product as part of a design for a consumer, or to a municipality or utility. Those are all really different from each other, and really different from drug development. They also tend to involve a very different skillset, much more chemical and mechanical engineering.
If your definition of "biotech" (an old word that seems less used nowadays) includes fields like bioinformatics and biomedical engineering, then there is a wide range of different technologies besides drugs.
