I was at the 2012 Bio Conference in Boston, Massachusetts two weeks ago. This annual meeting is organized by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and focuses mostly on the biopharma sector of biotech. BIO keeps a close eye on the business of biotech and reports industry progress.
I had the pleasure of giving two talks on behalf of a local biotech company called Biotech Primer, Inc that teaches non-scientists about biotechnology. Our home state of Maryland was well represented and had a big booth promoting our strong biotech position as one of the leaders in the business of biotech. I also spoke with Betsy Raymond Stevenson the official blogger for bio.org the conference organizer. We spoke about the difficulty of translating the complexity of biotechnology to the non-scientist, here is a link to a great blog Ms. Raymond Stevenson wrote about this matter: Explaining the complexity of bioscience
So here is the good news, according to bio.org, even though the biotech industry has suffered from the worldwide recession, and those ramifications continue, the industry is growing. Believe it or not since 2007 the Nasdaq Biotech Index is up 11%, the AMEX Biotech Index is up a whopping 52% while during the same period the S&P 500 was down 17%. At the same time, the percentage of companies with less than one year of cash went down, from 45% in 2008 to 21% in late 2010. Even IPOs have been trending upwards from 1 in 2008 to 17 in 2010.
All of these statistics present an optimistic outlook for our industry and we are hopeful that all of this good news means more employment opportunities and wonderful career advancement possibilities for our BioSciConcepts workshop attendees.
by Dr. Timothy Fawcett
Scientific Director
BioSciConcepts