Opening reception, Petco Park.

Last week the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) held its annual international convention, this year in San Diego. For four days more than 16,000 attendees gathered to meet, sit in panel meetings, network and attend receptions, like the opening gala at Petco Park, pictured above.

On the first full day of the conference, BIO released a set of principles on diversity. The need for an official set of principles is obvious, even to BIO itself. Julie Gerberding, the executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck, spent the past year chairing BIO’s workforce development, diversity and inclusion (WDDI) committee and establishing the principles. It is “striking,” she says, “when you first come into the organization and take a look around the table and realize, at least in terms of visible diversity, you’re not really looking like we should in this day and age.”

BIO is the largest and most prominent trade association for the global biotech industry, she noted, and its medicines, its crops, its fuels and enzymes, are aimed at everyone. The leadership needs to reflect that, Gerberding says, never mind that companies “with a broad and diverse leadership framework do better. No one refutes that position anymore.”

The principles include a commitment by BIO to “be outward-facing” in its diversity efforts, with diversity defined as a “wide-range of similarities and differences among persons and perspectives,” which follows the definition set forth by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Inclusion is described as “a business culture and environment that recognizes and effectively leverages the talents, skills, and perspectives of diverse employees,” and workforce development entails “ensuring all employees have the opportunities to develop the capabilities and skills required to meet the challenging needs in the biotechnology industry.”

How all this will be accomplished both inside BIO and in its member companies isn’t yet clear. The committee has identified eight areas around diversity to focus on, and over the coming weeks it will prioritize them and establish goals. Helen Torley, president and CEO of Halozyme, and new WDDI committee chair, says the idea is to gather metrics for each area and then measure progress. But, for starters, BIO will lead by example and undergo training for unconscious bias, which can cause discrimination against minorities in the hiring process, and the committee will also analyze the biotech pipeline of biomedical researchers. For instance, Torley says, “we know a lot of women graduate with [STEM] degrees but they are not advancing. This is a loss of people that could be future leaders or board members.”

It isn’t the first time BIO has considered diversity. The group held panel discussions at previous conferences and has long supported organizations such as Women in Bio. But it is the first time it has adopted specific principles it can be held accountable for. Over the past year, the biotech industry has been facing its gender inequality, and the principles come amid a broader global reckoning on race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and more. The principles are only a starting place, and the industry has a long way to go, as BIO freely admits, but there are two types of organizations: ones that recognize a problem when it arises, and ones that ignore it. BIO can be credited for recognizing the problem.

Brady Huggett

Source: The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity

In a week when two state legislatures passed bills requiring drug companies to justify drug prices, a panel at the BIO convention Monday on the ethics of drug discovery drew perhaps 50 people – a stark contrast to the standing-room only sessions in which biotech company execs presented boilerplate PowerPoint presentations.

The rest of the attendees missed a timely discussion of the complex issues facing biotech, including how to price drugs so the interests of both companies and the patient population are best served, and what a biotech company can do – or should so – about the increasing calls for transparency.

BioCentury’s Washington Editor Steve Usdin has been hosting interactive panels for several years at BIO, structuring them as a mock board-of-directors meeting. These fictional board members debate a series of questions Usdin poses, and the audience weighs in by casting votes via smart phone app.

This year’s panelists brought together a variety of perspectives. J. Leighton Read, a partner at Alloy Ventures, served as CEO. Hank Greely, from Stanford’s Law School; Pamela Gavin, of the National Organization of Rare Disorders; and the FDA’s Richard Moscicki took on the roles of board members of a company called iCures. This pretend company has not one, but two potential leads for serious illnesses with unmet needs – Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes. The board debated how to allocate limited resources, how to price the therapy, and whether to in-license a drug and quadruple its price (simply because they could).

The board agreed on a few things, such as securing partnerships to finance their drugs. They debated the wisdom of keeping the price of a drug lower than it might receive in the open market, as a way of insuring greater uptake, which ultimately would bring greater rewards to the company (and would be a good PR play), although they mused over whether there were any good models for determining the kinetics of uptake for maximizing profits.

Yet the issue of transparency scored the highest cohesion – to a person, the board was against supporting legislation that requires it, though not entirely for the same reasons. The arguments included the unfairness of singling out one industry for scrutiny, although one board member pointed out that iPhones and drugs are quite different animals, as not everyone wants or needs an iPhone, but everyone at some time in their life will need healthcare. And there was the argument that the data might not make much sense to the public anyway, given the complexity of developing a drug and bringing it to market. And finally, quite apart from ethical considerations, there was the idea that it is just plain bad policy for the government to get involved with pricing drugs (although we might be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t allow it in some form or another.)

So it’s a pity that more people didn’t attend this panel. In general, it seems the emphasis on ethics has taken a back seat at BIO this year. There was a time when BIO had a robust ethics track, but here in San Francisco the offerings are paltry. Is this because there simply weren’t many submitted, or because BIO’s selection committee did not see fit to choose them? Either way, ethical issues are at the forefront for a public that already views drug makers unfavorably. The BIO convention needs more panels like this, and fewer sessions in which industry folks pat each other on the back for a job well done.

Laura DeFrancesco