Biomedical innovation is shaking up societies around the world, prompting advances no one would have imagined a decade ago, and stirring debates about ethical and financial costs. The San Francisco Bay Area is teeming with people, companies, and ideas at the center of those advances and debates.
On December 10, at our annual San Francisco biotech forum, we’ll gather some of the most forward-thinking scientists, executives, founders, and VC backers who are making the Bay Area’s life sciences sector exciting, unpredictable, and indispensable for the future of biotech and healthcare.
Just a few examples we’ll be discussing:
—The worldwide fascination with gene editing, and its widespread use, in large part began with work from University of California, Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna. Her work has spawned two biotech startups, Caribou Biosciences in Berkeley and Intellia Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA.
—The state of California is embarking upon one of the world’s most ambitious precision medicine initiatives, spearheaded by Atul Butte, a pediatrician and bioinformatics expert at the University of California, San Francisco. Butte will describe the initiative and discuss the issues of costs, health outcomes, privacy, and more surrounding precision medicine.
—Genetic testing could become cheap and ubiquitous, but how will that make people healthier? And how will biotech companies such as San Francisco’s Invitae build sustainable businesses around the ever-growing reams of data?
—Few biological concepts are as disruptive as the microbiome, the trillions of microorganisms in and on our bodies whose role in our health is far more complicated than we ever imagined. We’ll discuss how Bay Area companies such as Second Genome are turning microbiome science into promising therapeutics.
Confirmed speakers:
—Nessan Bermingham, CEO, Intellia Therapeutics
—Peter DiLaura, CEO, Second Genome
—Randy Scott, CEO, Invitae
—Atul Butte, Director, Institute for Computational Health Sciences, UCSF
Join us at the Amgen facility in South San Francisco the afternoon of Dec. 10. Get more information and buy tickets here.
