Spring offers a great crop of life science meetings in the Boston area, and you still have time to sign up.
March 21-22: The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s Annual Meeting is focusing on personalized medicine. There will be exciting presentations and panels on an array of subjects, but I hear the gene patents panel will be of particular interest.
March 23: The LRIG New England Chapter is hosting an event at AstraZeneca. Ion Torrents, part of Life Technologies, will be presenting their NextGen Sequencing platform. IonTorrents was started by the serial entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg, who founded 454 Sequencing, CuraGen (now part of Celldex), and RainDance Technologies.
April 14: The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center sponsors a great NewCo opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs to see or show new companies in the pipeline. Billed as the Early-Stage Life Sciences Technology Conference VII, this is an annual event held at The Merck Research Labs to showcase companies with platform technologies developed at the research institutions, hospitals and universities.
June 7-9: Consumer Genetics Conference. John Boyce has done an amazing job capturing the consumer genetics landscape in this two-day meeting. He attracts top science and business people in the field; past presenters have been Francis Collins (NIH), George Church (Harvard), Jay Flatley (Illumina) and Greg Lucier (LifeTech).
June 2: Massachusetts Life Sciences Innovation Day is one of my favorite one-day conferences because of the breadth of platform, medical device, and pharma presentations. Past presenters have included George Whitesides from Harvard, Matthew W. Emmens from Vertex, Mara Aspinall from On-Q-ity, and James J. Mongan, President/CEO of Partners Healthcare.