Is Attending BIO CEO A Waste Of Your Time?
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
Sometimes it is worthwhile to stop and consider the value of your time, not from a financial perspective, but rather how much you’ve used and how much you have left. If you did, you might be much more discriminating in where you would choose to spend it. Consider this: the average U.S. male’s life expectancy is 76. This means that in less than 14,600 hours my time fuel tank will be exactly one-third full, or depending on your disposition, two-thirds empty. Knowing that time is our most precious, limited, and nonrenewable resource, when it comes to picking which biopharmaceutical industry conferences to attend, I have always tried to be highly selective. To those who perceive the annual BIO CEO Investor Conference as a poor man’s J.P. Morgan, they most likely have not been there — at least not lately.
A Convention That Challenges Convention
Having just celebrated its eighteenth birthday in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria, like most teenagers, BIO CEO is still young enough to challenge convention as to how an investor conference “should” be conducted. For in addition to the 191 company investor presentations it crammed into just two days, it also provided six fireside chats and eight educational panel sessions. Therapeutic category investors have to appreciate BIO’s attempt to maximize the value of their time. For example, for those with a primary interest in oncology, they could have started their Monday (February 8) attending the therapeutic session on improving oncology clinical trials from 8:00 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.), and not have to worry about missing any oncology company presentations. Now, let’s say you’re an investor who is interested in only companies with oncology assets in Phase 3. After attending the oncology therapeutic session and now armed with insights from panelist Paul Biondi, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s SVP and Head of BD, you could venture up to the presentation rooms and catch four back-to-back presentations of oncology companies (i.e., Inovio [NASDAQ: INO], Cyclacel [NASDAQ: CYCC], CytRx [NASDAQ: CYTR], and Galena [NASDAQ: GALE]) in Phase 3 development. While I understand the charm that can be had in navigating overly crowded hallways at other events, at BIO CEO the halls seem less trafficked, not because of low attendance, but excellent organization. The four company presentations referenced not only took place in the same room, but all before lunch. Now if you need a break, you could grab lunch in the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom and either hangout and network or catch a fireside chat with U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. With the heavy focus on the New Hampshire presidential primary, I felt a little politicked out and opted to instead spend my time networking. And while I heard Schumer’s chat was pretty entertaining, I found great value in randomly connecting with Richard Chipkin, PhD, president and CEO of Psyadon Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on psychiatric and neurological diseases; and Tim Dyer, CEO of Addex Therapeutics, a company focused on development of orally available small molecule allosteric modulators for neurological disorders. Now had I wanted to learn more about Phase 3 oncology companies after lunch, I could have headed back up to the presentation rooms and caught seven more presentations, five back-to-back in the same room and two others, also back-to-back but in a different room. But the most important thing I noticed about this schedule is how none of these overlapped one another, forcing you to decide between attending one Phase 3 oncology company presentation over another. While there is no perfect way to organize an investor conference that will please all of the people all of the time, BIO’s attention to these seemingly minor details, to me at least, represents a great deal of respect for not wanting to waste your most precious resource — time. Even more impressive is that BIO was able to dovetail this focus on time management with the launch of its powerful new ad campaign that highlights the most compelling benefits of biomedical research — giving patients time.
This concludes part 1 of my insights on this year’s BIO CEO Conference. In Part 2, BIO CEO Educational Sessions Provide Enlightenment, we will dig into some of the challenges faced by the biopharmaceutical industry (i.e., “high” drug prices, communicating value, and high risk versus high reward). Stay Tuned.