#flandersbio

Peter Verrykt and I attended BIO International Convention on April 21-25, 2013 in Chicago together with a FlandersBio mission with the best of the best from Flanders Biotech.

It started off well with a great networking dinner organized by FIT (Flanders Investment & Trade - http://www.flanderstrade.be/) and FlandersBio. Great connections and insights and the BioConvention didn’t start yet. And always great to see former colleagues and friends with formal and less formal chats.

Monday started well with some good panels and hot items as patient advocacy groups and giving access to the voice of the patients. Great to see how Eli Lilly is demonstrating how to do this. A panel on Wednesday about modernizing clinical trials confirmed this approach and how patients engage using social media. The growing data, aka pharmageddon, need to be transformed in better insights. Three big pharma representatives again talked about the urgency of opening and sharing data. Clearly a confirmed trend. Real world evidence, open innovation in biopharmaceutical R&D in these changing times get embraced by all big pharma: AstraZeneca and JNJ showcased some examples and explained future plans: “By sharing new ideas and enabling scientific innovation to cross boundaries between companies, academia, government and non-profit organizations, we can accelerate new ideas into innovative medicines.”

There was also a very nice Flemish panel with ThromboGenics, Galapagos & Complix/Ablynx: great stories of successful entrepreneurship & top science in Belgium. This was also confirmed in many chats during the whole convention, the Belgian pavilion was crowded and the top ranking of VIB (Flemish Institute of Biotechnology) is recognized and respected. The Belgian night downtown was amazing: 850 visitors, great ambiance, good networking and fun. Not to forget the Belgian fries and beer. J

The FierceBiotech exec meeting gave great insights and showed again the need for big data analytics and data driven drug discovery. The numbers of the pharma conundrum were noted again: less drugs and costs still rising. The next panel discussion moderated by Ryan Mc Bride from FierceBiotech again discussed the need for being able to analyze big open data. Gunaretnam (Guna) Rajagopal, VP & CIO Research, Bioinformatics & External Innovation at Janssen, together with Marc Berger, Vice President Real World Data and Analytics at Pfizer gave some of their views on how they will help transform the business. A good quote to finalize:  "At the end we'll end up in an open source data world and things will speed up by who can analyze this best. “ We’re looking forward to assist.