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  San Diego captured the world’s attention by hosting a nearly flawless Republican Convention in 1996. This month, the city hopes to repeat its success with the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s annual convention. The convention’s not only a showcase for the city, it could drive home San Diego’s emergence as the third-largest center for biotech in the country, behind the San Francisco Bay Area and the Boston/New England region. Although biotechnology has its roots in esoteric science, the business of biotechnology has become a public phenomenon. The Human Genome Project, embryonic stem cells, genetically modified food and other issues transformed last year’s BIO convention in Boston. They’ll be on the agenda here as well, not only at the June 24 through 27 sessions at the San Diego Convention Center but at various anti-biotech protests. About 11,000 people attended the Boston convention, says Carl Feldbaum, BIO’s president. This month in San Diego, 15,000 people may attend. Besides scientists, these will include hundreds of reporters eager to describe everything that happens at the convention — positive or negative. Can San Diego pull it off again? Conference organizers say they can. While they expect — and invite — spirited debate and discussion of biotechnology’s role, they don’t expect San Diego to turn into a Seattle-like battleground. Instead, San Diego will use the spotlight to show the world how San Diegans took biotechnology out of research labs and turned it into a defining feature of the economy. The Local Role San Diegans will play a prominent role in the convention, says Joseph Panetta, president and CEO of Biocom San Diego, the trade group for biotech and biomedicine here. Local biotech executives and researchers will lead or help present one-third of the events. Along with Biocom, the state of California, the California Trade & Commerce Agency, the county of San Diego and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. are in charge locally of convention preparation. Feldbaum notes that David E. Robinson, president and CEO of Ligand Pharmaceuticals, became BIO’s chairman in February. Interviewed in late April on his second trip to San Diego for the convention, Feldbaum says his main worry about the turnout is to accommodate all the people expected to arrive. “It’s a nice-looking convention center, but we are growing so fast,” Feldbaum says. The Boston convention took place in March, not the best time to visit that New England city, he notes. “I think San Diego in June will be very, very popular.” A Crowded Agenda BIO has prepared scores of seminars appealing to almost every aspect of biotechnology, from hard science (“Glycosylation in the Era of Proteomics: Will Sugars be the Limiting Factor in Protein Production?”) to biotechnology’s social impact (“Using Modern Biotechnology to Achieve Sustainability”). Look for several San Diego-specific sessions, such as “San Diego Moves to Local Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing — How and Why?” Outside of the daytime convention center activities, visiting government officials will be offered a tour of San Diego’s biotech companies as the convention opens, and news media will get a similar tour. Other meetings and receptions will be geared toward business and marketing. The Economic Development Corp. and the city of San Diego will sponsor a reception for all visiting legislators. For the first time, BIO will hold an event aimed at helping the general public understand biotechnology’s benefits. Called HealthFest 2001, the free event will be from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, June 24, at Embarcadero Park North. Biotech companies and research groups will host exhibits at HealthFest where members of the public can learn more about how biotechnology can affect their lives. “We’re taking a bit of a risk by opening up this meeting to the public,” Panetta concedes. “But one criticism of last year’s convention was that there was no event for the public.” Biocom’s attitude toward protesters is that they have a constitutional right to protest, but not to disrupt another group’s activities, Panetta says. “We want them to do it in a nonviolent way. It’s going to be up to the San Diego police, the harbor police and the (convention) security team to ensure that. Our main goal is for those attending to have a positive, exciting and safe experience. We’re not encouraging dialogue with the protesters.” A BIO Debutante
BioQ has developed a software system that helps biotech and pharmaceutical companies find and manage medical, scientific and regulatory information. This software brings to biotech advances in information technology long standard in other industries, Asher says. About 18 months in the making, the software employs an “intelligent agent” that automatically performs tasks for the user. The agent periodically will search for information wanted by the user and make it available, Asher says. Moreover, it learns from the user queries and looks for information by the context, not simply by searching for strings of matching characters. This creates a kind of customized library that represents the knowledge the user has gained in the job. If the user leaves the company, Asher says, the institutionalized knowledge is retained by the company. BioQ ponied up $100,000 to become a platinum sponsor of the convention. It also convinced three partners to do the same — IBM, Sun Microsystems and the Accenture consulting group. Together, the four helped BIO create a whole track of seminars called “e-Solutions for the Life Science Industry” devoted to helping biotech companies learn how advanced data systems can help them. Of course, the seminars also help the companies get closer to potential clients. The Biggest Lesson: Cooperation San Diego’s biotech successes by now are well-known locally. These include Idec Pharmaceuticals, maker of Rituxan, a popular therapeutic for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; and Invitrogen, a Carlsbad-based maker of biotech research kits. But the real trick will be to relay the San Diego biotech story to a larger audience. In telecommunications, San Diego’s fame was made by the emergence of Qualcomm as a public company worth tens of billions of dollars. No biotech company in San Diego remotely approaches that value; Idec, the one with the highest total stock value, was worth just $9 billion as of late May. Qualcomm then was worth $53 billion — and it has been worth more than $100 billion. Although no one biotech company dominates San Diego the way Qualcomm overshadows the local telecom industry, the local biomedical industry as a whole can boast of some impressive numbers, compiled by the California Healthcare Institute, the San Diego Regional Technology Alliance and the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.
“The success of biotech in San Diego has a lot to do with the fact that we have an environment where people work together,” Panetta says. “That’s also true when it comes to the success of this meeting.” If events go as planned, that “success story” will have played by late June to a worldwide audience.
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With the world’s biotechnology elite in one place, BIO 2001 is the perfect venue to introduce a new product for the community, says Howard Asher, founder of BioQ, a Carlsbad startup.