On the Road: San Francisco J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

A few weeks ago I attended the healthcare industry’s largest financial conference.  Emerging drug companies and global leaders discussed their 2011 financial results, pipeline and prospects with analysts, venture capitalists, fund managers and life science executives. 

Chemical & Engineering News reported that, “The atmosphere in San Francisco was charged with enthusiasm in the wake of deals indicating that drug companies are prepared to invest in innovative science.”

Life Technologies introduced their genome sequencing machine which some experts believe might be used to routinely guide prevention and treatment on an individual basis.

Other genome-related conference news included funding from Sanofi, Third Rock Ventures and Greylock Partners for the launch of startup Warp Drive Bio.  According to Fierce Biotech, “With a brand new approach for discovering drugs from nature, Warp Drive aims to search the genomes of microbes for molecules that have the potential to target disease pathways that have eluded all other attempts to do so. It's the brainchild of Greg Verdine, a chemical biologist at Harvard and venture partner at Third Rock.”

It seemed that there were more global companies talking about collaborations with emerging companies than the past few years (Chris Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi, spent a lot of time on this in his Q&A session).

The pace of commercialization can be very slow in a heavily-regulated industry, but after a wave of M&A activity, a few years of evaluating the new US healthcare regulations and key C-level management changes, there were many positive forecasts presented at this year’s Conference.

-          Bob Di Scipio