Recognized today as one of the world’s most-innovative companies, BioMarin was a far cry from that 12 years ago when Jean-Jacques Bienaimé took over.

Having Jean-Jacques (J.J.) Bienaimé, chairman and CEO of BioMarin Pharmaceutical, on our cover this month represents a recent trend happening at our magazine — we’re interviewing more and more CEOs and presidents.

If you have never served on a corporate board, you might be curious as to what it all entails. Thanks to BioBreak and Drexel University, Life Science Leader undertook the development of a three-part series of articles titled “Journey To The Corporate Boardroom.”

With the BIO International 2017 Convention being just seven weeks away, your preparations as an attendee should be well underway. But until they arrive on-site, many people often overlook deciding what educational sessions to attend. And while BIO attendees can afford to take such an approach, speakers certainly cannot. As the past BIO educational planning co-chair, I can attest that a lot of work goes into pulling off a high-quality educational session at BIO. Consider the following example.

I’ve been thinking, if you were going to name someone to be the biopharmaceutical industry CEO of the year, who would it be? But even more important than the who is the why. What criteria would you use? I’ve been looking through a bunch of articles that list top influencers for our industry, and the criterion for inclusion seems pretty subjective. There are media outlets that employ a variety of objective measures (i.e., company performance). And while perhaps better than a completely subjective approach, we all know that having great sales performance doesn’t necessarily make you a great leader. One of the best methodologies I have seen for naming a top CEO was done by the Harvard Business Review in 2015. It included financial data (weighted at 80 percent) and a measurement of a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance (weighted at 20 percent).

Not long ago I had the opportunity to go to an invitation-only event attended by some of the biopharmaceutical industry’s biggest thought leaders. At the time, Repeal and Replace of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a priority for the new administration. But now that it has failed, you might be wondering what else should folks in biopharma be paying attention to?

Many of the company founders I’ve spoken with often admit that had they known how difficult starting a biopharmaceutical company would be, they would have likely never embarked on the journey in the first place.

Read why Roivant Sciences founder and CEO Vivek Ramaswamy has been portrayed by some as being the next wizard of Wall Street for “conjuring drug companies from thin air.”

“When presenting a companion diagnostic offering to biopharmaceutical executives after a drug has been launched, I have watched their eyes grow bigger and bigger as they realize they have hitched their per-share earnings to a business that doesn’t respond to traditional marketing activity,” says Alan Wright, M.D., chief medical officer for Roche Diagnostics Corp.