[Updated 3:30 pm] It may not seem right as the weather has turned so beautiful, but it’s time to leave the T-shirt and jeans in the closet and break out the sportcoat for the biggest annual event in Seattle biotech.
About 1,000 people are expected to come together at the Washington State Convention Center tomorrow for Life Science Innovation Northwest, the annual conference organized by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association. Registration starts at 7 am, the program begins at 8 am, and Jeff Raikes, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will get things going with the breakfast keynote talk at 8:30 am. Biotech industry maven Steve Burrill will also offer up his latest biotech industry overview during the lunch hour.
While biotech is hardly the most visible industry in this town, and there have been some high-profile blowups (hello Dendreon), there are still plenty of people doing interesting things in the development of drugs, devices, diagnostics, vaccines, and more. I’m personally looking forward to hearing updates from quite a few big and small companies such as Seattle Genetics (cancer drugs), NanoString Technologies (molecular diagnostics), Adaptive Biotechnologies (diagnostics/immune system research) and Aqueduct Neuroscience (medical devices), to name a few. Those last three companies are a few of the interesting spinouts of the past few years from the Institute for Systems Biology, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the University of Washington. You can plan out which organizations you want to see by checking the agenda here.
For those of you who can’t be there but are on Twitter, I’ll be sending out live updates from my account @ldtimmerman and keeping them organized through the searchable hash tag #LSINW. For those of you who will be there in the flesh—and I know a lot of Xconomy readers will be—I look forward to seeing you there. Who knows, maybe I’ll find some time to soak up a little sun on the patio during one of the coffee breaks.
