We’re looking forward to a great morning tomorrow at our half-day conference, How to Build a Life Sciences Company. In addition to the keynote chat with legendary MIT inventor and entrepreneur Bob Langer and Polaris Venture Partners co-founder Terry McGuire (Xconomy chief correspondent Wade Roush will moderate), we have five case studies of recent startups with different strategies for raising funding and getting going: everything from venture philanthropy to new types of collaborations. Plus, there’s a spotlight presentation from Quanterix, the latest spinoff from Tufts University and David Walt, who also founded Illumina.
One last treat: two special guests from Xconomy’s sister city of Seattle, where we launched in June. One is Alex Rives, an associate at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners. He is a co-founder and founding president of Fate Therapeutics, which is the focus of one of tomorrow’s case studies. Both he and Polaris general partner Amir Nashat will be speaking about Fate’s unique cross-country collaboration, not just between venture firms but between leading scientists. We also will be hearing from David Schubert, chief business officer of Accelerator Corp., the famous Seattle incubator/startup engine. He will be joining our panel on new approaches to incubation, which will be moderated by Xconomy national biotech editor Luke Timmerman, who is also in from Seattle.
It should be a busy morning, concluding with a great networking lunch–all hosted by the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research here in Cambridge. You can get the agenda here and registration details here. Hope to see you tomorrow.
