MassBio: “We believe strongly in partnering”
“Big mergers in life sciences may grab the business headlines, but what replenishes and refreshes big pharma’s pipeline is small biotech companies; their innovation is our focus,” said Imran Nasrullah, Chief Business Officer at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.
Nasrullah is the point man on innovation for a powerful business organization, called MassBio for short, that has a regional focus but a much larger footprint dealing with the dozens of international pharmaceutical companies who have set up research facilities around Boston and speaking for the industry with an increasingly influential voice in Washington.
“Massachusetts’ strength in the life science sector is in innovation,” explained Nasrullah. “Other regional biotechnology clusters might excel in more downstream activities like manufacturing, but we put our weight behind start-up companies. MassBio is also working hard to collaborate with medical centers and other industry players to propel innovative technologies from academic laboratories into the stream of commerce, whether through start-ups or partnering agreements.”
MassBio’s new program, MassCONNECT, seeks to “match seasoned biotechnology professionals with new players to help facilitate the start-up of new companies or the development of a new technology.”
“We believe strongly in partnering,” said Nasrullah. “As one of our expanding biotech companies moves downstream past proof of principle, it looks to winning a large validating deal to prove its product or technology is the real thing and of value to industry.”
One of the ways MassBio helps member companies is through Pharma Days, a series of events launched in late 2008 as the market was spiraling down. “Pharma Days allow Massachusetts’ biotechnology executives to meet the heads of business development at big pharmaceutical companies in a targeted partnering discussion. It is all about networking, since business development and partnering is really a ‘contact sport,’” Nasrullah said. Each MassBio Pharma Day has attracted C-level representatives from 120 to 130 Massachusetts companies and anecdotal evidence of potential partnership or development deals is already rolling in.
A Pharma Day event, which can sometimes stretch into two days, is organized around a single large pharmaceutical company that spends the morning explaining its strategic intentions for research and development. A key insight for biotechnology business executives is understanding the internal processes for evaluating a discovery program, identifying gatekeepers and the key milestones in that evaluation process.
The remainder of the company’s visit to MassBio is dedicated to hour-long, one-on-one partnering meetings between a big pharma company and individual biotechnology companies. Companies who have participated so far include Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
“Typically a pharma company will have 10 or 15 companies they know they want to meet with when they come to Massachusetts,” said Nasrullah. “But we also will identify another 10 or 15 companies they might not know about who are in early stages or who are flying under their radar. The result is a pharma company will end up with between 30 and 40 of these partnering meetings.”
“Pharma companies recognize the value of such a targeted gathering of biotech executives and will bring a team of science scouts and licensing people,” he said, adding “Lilly met with 30 local companies and when they left they said it was the best two days they had ever experienced for business development. They said they saw a lot of people who they simply would not have seen otherwise.”
“I do not believe there is a richer area anywhere in the world for biotechnology than in Massachusetts,” said Nasrullah. “Where else can a pharma company go to meet with so many biotechnology companies backed by blue-chip VCs, who fit their strategic goals at one sitting than at MassBio?”
“Our role for our members is making sure the life saving medicines discovered in biotech companies find a path to commercialization. It becomes a very symbiotic relationship where the biotech companies get access to further research and the pharma companies get access to novel molecules,” he said.
The third leg of MassBio’s Innovation Services is the annual Investors Forum, a partnering event gathering not only traditional venture capitalists, but also what Nasrullah describes as “non-traditional sources of financing, such as government agencies, disease foundations dedicated to research for a specific disorder, and corporate strategics.”
“For our Investors Forum, we license a partnering software program from EBD Group that was very well received by participants,” he said. “This led to a friendly relationship with EBD Group. When we heard that they were going to bring their growing and successful BioPharm America partnering event to Boston in 2010, we convinced them that they should collaborate with MassBio for their event.”
As a result, in September of this year the MassBio Investor Forum will be folded into the BioPharm America conference to create a unique, high-powered business exchange that melds the international biotech partnering and financial communities.
“We want people to know that Boston is the crossroads of innovative biotechnology companies as well as premier venture capital, and that major pharmaceutical companies have located their research and development facilities here because of the proximity to innovation and capital,” he said. “This makes for a magic combination, putting all the elements for innovative start-ups in one place.
MassBio estimates nearly 1,273 biotechnology drugs were being developed in Massachusetts in 2009, representing almost 8 percent of the global drug pipeline. In 2006, Massachusetts venture capitalists invested almost USD 760 million in biotechnology companies, comprising 18 percent of biotechnology venture capital investment in the United States.
