Boston Blog

Academics join industry for this week’s biotech megameeting

Academia will boost its profile at this year’s 2012 Bio International conference, which starts Monday. The Globe calls it the largest biotechnology conference in the world and organizers expect more than 15,000 people. See this space for updates.

New this year: AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center are sponsoring a project called the, “BIO Academic Zone,” which  BIO describes as the first ever dedicated zone to academics and will serve as a pavilion for academic and industry partnering meetings as well as provide a venue for highlighting the involvement of academia in the Convention and the industry as a whole.”

And, a full afternoon session will be devoted to tech transfer. Among the speakers, keynote from BU president  Robert A. Brown and panelist Curtis Keith, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Harvard’s  Biomedical Accelerator Fund.

Another session at the meeting is entitled: Academic Medical Centers: The New Pharma R&D Engine and Beyond

As large pharmaceutical firms shed their R&D staff and need a new source of IP, the relationship between AMCs and life sciences is more important than ever… AMCs need pharmaceutical companies as well because government research funding is drying up. In order to survive these new partnerships, AMCs need to address their own organizational shortcomings around decentralized administration, infrastructure, research commercialization, and a lack of business intelligence capabilities. Likewise pharma needs to excel in a new world of open partnerships where ideas and resources are increasingly shared beyond corporate boundaries.

Another sesssion includes a hard look at what is and isn’t working in tech transfer:

Are We Going to Continue to Let the Tail Wag the Dog? Technology transfer metrics tend to measure activity, not impact. As a result, we may have lost much of the context that should be deciding our strategies for moving forward. Are the things we measure in the future going to be more of the same “tail that wags the dog,” or will we develop meaningful measures that tell the true story behind innovation management and technology transfer?

And this talk on NIH funding for biotechs will cover the activity of the new NIH  Office of Translational Research:

NIH has multiple mechanisms, such as NeuroNEXT and OTR (NINDS) and technology transfer (at the NIH and Institute level), to facilitate working with biotech companies to promote the nations’ health. NINDS has two programs to spotlight in this regard: NeuroNEXT-a clinical trials network and the Office of Translational Research-which has many initiatives to promote translational research for neurological diseases. NIH technology transfer promotes collaborative research opportunities to develop, evaluate and/or commercialize products created at NIH. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) was just established in December 2011; its mission is “to catalyze the generation of innovative methods and technologies that will enhance the development, testing, and implementation of diagnostics and therapeutics across a wide range of human diseases and conditions.”

For a better sense of what this meeting is about, here is a breakdown of the session topics;

  • Achieving Regulatory Approval And Compliance
  • Biofuels And Biobased Chemicals
  • Biotech Patenting And Tech Transfer
  • Business Development
  • Career Development
  • Drug Discovery And Development
  • Finance
  • Food And Agriculture
  • Global Innovations And Markets
  • Health Policy And Reimbursement
  • Innovations In Vaccines
  • International Case Studies
  • Manufacturing Of Biologics And Drugs
  • Orphan Disease

 

Comments

Comments are closed.