Nordic Life Science 1
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS orea has long been a feature at
European biotech conferences and now according to BioKorea project manager Merian KJ Kim, there is a renewed effort from the government to grow the sector (including medtech) to be 6% of economy by 2030. “We find that with our focus on Europe, all players at the conference. So we come in force – 28 companies + 50 delegates.” It was also good to see the US not being complacent. The first BIO-Europe came from an initiative by Morrie Ruffin then at BIO bringing over a delegation of 20 US companies. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center were among several organisations who see Bio-Europe as more important than ever. “It’s an increasingly competitive and global sector,” said VP Robin Deades. “We believe we have strong advantages – quality of life, an established hub of 700 companies employing 64,000 and featuring start-ups to large corporations such as Merck, Novo, Grifols and Pfizer. We attract a large amount of NIH funding to our universities including Duke and North Carolina. And we are involved in new areas such as precision medicine with Locus Biosciences and their CRISPR therapeutics. But we have to get out and tell people, so BIO-Europe is a must.” Finally, what about the quality of partnering. Over the three days I ran into several Nordic companies who are longstanding BIO-Europe fans including Sprint, Follicum and Bioinvent. However, the best measure came from a chance meeting with a first-time start-up attendee. Dr Oommen Varghese is CSO of RNAi therapeutics company Uppsala Therapeutics and was delighted with the results: “This is the first time I have attended such a meeting and had little time to prepare being so busy in the lab. However, I was amazed to be asked for 20 meetings with leading pharma and biotech companies and have already signed several CDAs as a result.” I’ve always been a strong advocate of BIO, but revisiting BIO-Europe after a few years, I am now convinced it should be on every budding Nordic biotech’s agenda. And I firmly believe the Nordics should be on the list of potential venues. “We were delighted with the success of Copenhagen last year,” says Putz. “We would love to return to the region and Stockholm is definitely on our radar.” NLS