Why are proteins important?

It's not a major driver of the total cost of developing a new medicine, which is on the order of a billion USD. However, these types of licensing agreements can become major obstacles for startup biotechs, startup service businesses (contract research labs that do lab work for other customers), and small cap pharma. Typically patent holders in this area will ask for recurring payments of between $5,000-20,000 annually and royalties of between 5 and 10% on anything the technology was used for. It doesn't seem like much, but if you had to start paying 6 or 7 of those you'd already have quite a bill to settle just to open your doors. This is on top of the already massive costs of starting a biotech (especially compared to tech) due to the requirements of owning or renting very expensive and sensitive laboratory equipment. In addition to the pure cash aspect of drug discovery, there's the issue of time. New drugs take around 10-15 years to develop, 3-6 of those years will be spent in what is called "Drug Discovery", which is the area the vector here would be used in. Check out chapter 4, page 32 for an overview here: http://www.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/PhRMA%20Profile%202013.pdf If a multisystem vector was used during the early stages of DD, I could see it being possible to shave 6 months to a year off of the drug discovery timeline. It would also provide a way to rescue many of the early projects that end up being cancelled due to inability to make the target protein. This last aspect is really important, because there is a serious lack of new targets in drug discovery. Part of the reason for this is risk management, but the other part is that when scientists(in industry) propose new targets, they often only have a few months to demonstrate that the target is viable. These few months can easily be eaten up in protein expression and purification testing.