Powerful growth of BIO-Europe Spring meets industry need for productive partnering
Gathering over 1,700 delegates from 1,061 companies in only its fourth year, BIO-Europe Spring 2010 provided proof of principle for conference producer EBD Group that “Partnering is here to stay in life sciences.”
This year offered a compelling demonstration that the introduction of BIO-Europe Spring in 2006 created the right event at the right moment to satisfy the unmet need for productive partnering as a means of achieving greater growth for both pharma and biotech companies.
Carola Schropp
In her opening plenary address, President of EBD Group, Carola Schropp, welcomed participants to Barcelona and introduced a prestigious panel of officials that included Manel Balcells, the President of the executive committee for BioCat, and Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, Vice President for the Government of Catalonia.
“The top big pharma companies arrived in force for this annual partnering meeting,” she reported, adding that 1,900 projects were up for discussion.
The partneringONE® software that powers the one-to-one meetings at BIO-Europe Spring logged over 9,000 pre-arranged meetings, “which does not include meetings organized separately by the companies, nor the ad-hoc meetings that take place here both formally and informally,” she noted.
The conference program that serves as backdrop to the partnering meetings on the first day of the event featured 17 workshops and panel discussions with 70 leading life science executives, venture capitalists, academic researchers and consultants participating as speakers.
Company presentations were scheduled for 108 companies ranging from major pharmaceuticals outlining their criteria for development programs to small biotechnology start-ups describing their discovery projects.
John Craighead from BIO, the Biotechnology Industry Organization based in Washington, DC, provided a state-of-the-industry overview that offered encouraging news of a revival of fortunes, reporting that publicly held biotechnology companies in the USA outperformed other major sectors of the American economy since the beginning of the financial crisis in October 2007.
The resurgence has also brought about a “return of the small-cap companies,” he said with companies valued at under USD 50 million performing the best in the class.
Financial markets are re-opening with follow-on public offerings totaling USD 6 billion last year, which is three times the values posted in 2008.
On the downside, “we have lost a number of biotech companies,” he said, reporting that 25 percent of publicly traded companies have declined to file Security & Exchange Commission papers, “or else have simply not been trading.”
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