Replies to post #3449 on GTC Biotherapeutics (fka GTCB)

[goatfondler]

Good to see that Michael J Fox is going to be there to shake things up.

[gym gravity]

Bio tech party
Biotech party revs up
It's not just the main show that matters -- spinoff conferences are boon for city and industry
By Stephen Heuser, Globe Staff | May 4, 2007
At 6 tonight, Peter Chaffey's jet-lagged body clock -- still set on Australian time -- will tell him it's Saturday morning. But his social calendar will say it's cocktail hour on the Boston waterfront.


Along with nearly 200 Australian trade representatives and biotechnology executives, Chaffey will be capping off a day of business deals and biomedical schmoozing at a wine-tasting with a view of the harbor.
At the same time, dozens of executives from India will descend on the Marriott Copley Place to talk about inking partnerships with US biotechnology companies. And nearby, representatives of medical-research parks across the country will be checking into the Fairmont Copley Plaza to talk about how to jump-start new biotech companies in their hometowns.
They're drawn here from all points of the compass by the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, now being set up at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center . Though the 20,000-person gathering doesn't formally kick off until Sunday, it is already drawing hundreds of people to the city for "piggybacking" conferences, a little-tracked but important by product of huge conventions.
"It's like a magnet for activities," said John Chiplin, an Australian biotech executive coming to Boston this weekend. "And also Boston itself, it's such a hub for biotechnology, it's a great place to be having it."
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority doesn't keep track of how many of these spinoff conventions come to the city, or their economic impact. But executive director James Rooney said they're a key part of the estimated $31 million in spending the BIO International Convention is estimated to be bringing to Boston.
"It speaks to why being a major convention and meeting destination is important," Rooney said. "It's not just about what happens inside the building."
Though biotechnology is a highly specialized industry, largely driven by newly hatched science, it is also fiercely dependent on building tight relationships between investors, profitable drug companies, and smaller money-losing biotech operations.
BIO, the organizer and national trade group for the industry, tracks the side conferences but does not release their names, because attendance is by invitation.
Such secondary meetings aren't always welcome at major conferences. Last year, during the LinuxWorld conference in Boston, a rival search-engine conference set up shop in a hotel lobby and tried to drain visitors from the main event. And the Massachusetts convention authority recently denied the request of a drug company to throw a meeting at the same time as a major drug-discovery convention.
The BIO side events being held this week, though unofficial, are largely welcome -- scheduled not to compete with the giant trade show, but to take advantage of the fact that BIO attendees are already in town. For Australians like Chiplin, the Boston meeting might just be another stop on a multiday tour of the United States: He has already been to San Francisco and New York.
"Any time you're flying from Australia you're basically buying a round-the-world ticket," said Diane Sinclair of the American Australian Association , who organized today's Boston Biorelationships conference.
The cocktail party is cosponsored by sister cities Boston and Melbourne, where Chaffey is manager of business development. It also has a secret weapon: sponsorship by the famed Australian winery Penfolds.
"They always provide great Australian wines," Sinclair said.
Not all the side-event attendees will show up at BIO. The Biotechnology Institute , an affiliated group focusing on education, is hosting 150 science teachers from around the country to get them interested in including biotechnology in their curriculums.
Last night, the teachers gathered at the Museum of Science to watch an IMAX movie; today, they'll tour laboratories at Boston University and take field trips to local drug companies.
And when BIO ends next week, the meetings still won't trail off. Although most of the conference will have vanished by the time the closing party takes over Jillian's gaming emporium Wednesday night, the next day marks a Scandinavian assault on Cambridge: Cancer experts from Denmark, Sweden and Norway -- along with the "best and brightest of Scandinavia's aspiring biotech companies," say the promoters -- will meet at Biogen Idec Inc. in Cambridge, hoping to forge ties with local oncologists.

[gym gravity]

thank you Lucy for putting GTCB next to Millipore, Genzyme and Biogen:

http://www.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2007/05/07/story17.html?from_rss=1

Bay State digs deep, grows up since BIO 2000
Plastics, goats among innovation hotbeds
Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology - May 4, 2007by Lucy Caldwell-Stair

When BIO last held its conference in Boston seven years ago, the human genome hadn't been fully sequenced, biotech stock prices were soaring, bioinformatics was brand-new, and global pharmaceutical competition hadn't heated up yet.

While much has changed for New England biotech since BIO 2000, ingenuity still shines brilliantly here, especially in therapeutics research and development and in bioengineering, as shown in two companies who will exhibit at the conference this May in Boston.

Millipore Corp. in Billerica is making the dream of the "plastics factory" a reality with its disposable bioprocessing equipment. Single-use plastic bags and pipes don't need to be disinfected for repeated use, trumping traditional stainless steel.

"Over the past two years, disposables for biopharmaceuticals have really taken off," said Roberta Landon, group product manager in Millipore's Bioprocess Division. "The major driver is that they assist with speed to market," she said.

GTC Biotherapeutics is taking production even further. The Framingham-based company manufactures human proteins in goats. Yes, a flock of goats is the newest pharmaceutical factory. Using farm animals to raise antibodies for research has become routine, but it's a completely new feat to grow human proteins in genetically engineered goats. These proteins are extracted and purified to become lifesaving drugs for patients who can't make them on their own.

Last summer, GTC Biotherapeutics won European regulatory approval to commercialize the human anti-clotting protein it extracts from the milk of transgenic goats. It's one of many human proteins that can't be made in enough quantity using its usual method of growing live cells in vats. GTC's new technique is creating entirely new markets.

"The key competitive advantage we have is we don't have limited production capacity, so the company can expand into therapies that require large quantities of product," said president Geoffrey Cox, recently to investors.

Of course, New England faces stiff competition from abroad as well as from other U.S. regions. That competition will be out in force during BIO 2007 and supported by dozens of economic development groups and consortia exhibiting at the convention -- the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council says it's ready.

A surge of startups that had begun at about the same time as BIO 2000 filled the state with companies that, in 2002, were considered "a bit like adolescents -- well beyond the infancy of their startup years, but not yet adults in the sense of being healthy, profitable companies," according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council in its MassBiotech 2010 report, published at about the same time.

Since then, many of those biotechnology and life sciences companies have either folded or grown up. The investment community has certainly responded. The IPO market has once again begun to open, offering exit opportunities for those companies that were able to find funding. And more and more companies are being funded. For example, in 2000, biopharmaceutical companies in Greater Boston raised $370 million in venture capital investment, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. Last year, that number was $570 million.

And while earlier this decade no Massachusetts pharmaceutical company had produced a blockbuster drug (more than $1 billion in sales), last year saw two companies with drugs selling in that stratosphere. At Biogen Idec, sales of Avonex generated worldwide revenue of $1.7 billion in 2006, up from sales of $1.5 billion in 2005. And Genzyme Corp. said sales of its Cerezyme drug totaled $1 billion in 2006, which represented 35 percent of all product revenue for the Cambridge company.

If all goes according to plan at GTC Biotherapeutics, its anti-clotting drug could someday be a $500 million to $700 million drug, said Cox, its president. More drugs will follow for oncology and automimmune diseases based on growing hard-to-express proteins in transgenic mammals.

And Millipore's disposables make it easier for Massachusetts' biotech "teenagers" to proceed through drug development, that is, "for folks in Phase 2, where you're still not sure you're going to make it through the trials," says Landon.

Lucy Caldwell-Stair is a freelance writer in Newton.