Finally at BIO 2008

June 18, 2008 – 12:20 am

At 3 p.m. yesterday, I was finishing my packing, anticipating a leisurely drive to Philadelphia International Airport to embark upon a journey that was to deposit me in San Diego around 11:30 p.m. But Mother Nature had other plans. Storms around my area of the East Coast pushed my 6:30 p.m. flight to 9:30 p.m., causing me to miss my connecting flight in Dallas/Fort Worth. On the way to Dallas, I looked out the window and saw lightning playing in the top layers of the clouds (a vision similar to the photo at left, found at How Stuff Works) and felt oddly blessed. Luckily, my boss allowed me to book a room at the Hyatt at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, letting me to grab some much-needed sleep, and (fortunately for the benefit of all those I interviewed today), the opportunity to shower and change into fresh clothes. After my morning flight in from Dallas, I headed straight from the airport to the San Diego convention center. Interviews have happened with Murray L. Aitken from IMS, several members of the life sciences team from Deloitte (including Glenn Snyder, author of “The Right Spice” paper on this page), Warwick S. Bedwell from Roche, who talked with me about the company’s partnering practices, and Jeffrey Clark, the CEO of Beaker, a startup networking/career-building Website for those in life-sciences companies.

I’ll go into all of these things in more detail in a later post, but exhaustion has pretty much caught up with me. I will finish this post with a little scoop, though (at least a scoop if you read this post before the announcement tomorrow). The interview with Mr. Bedwell finished with the news that Roche has entered a partnership with Thrombogenics, a biotech company specializing in the development of vascular biopharmaceuticals. The deal centers around Thrombogenics’ anti-PIGF drug, TB-403, which has entered Phase I clinical trials for cancer. Mr. Bedwell says the drug complements the cancer drug Avastin (the Genentech drug Roche markets in Europe), and the company’s corporate culture complements Roche’s own. “We do 44 deals a year,” Mr. Bedwell says. “But deals like this one don’t come along every day.”