Our annual San Francisco Bay Area biotech forum is right around the corner. This year we’re highlighting the most disruptive areas of life science and the Bay Area scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors behind them. Spend a few hours with us on Dec. 10 to explore the profound effects these people hope to trigger in healthcare, business, and society, and the future implications of those changes.
The agenda is ready to peruse here, and you can register for the afternoon event at Amgen’s South San Francisco campus here.
Human gene editing is going to be a big focus on Dec. 10, which is just one week after the world convenes in Washington, D.C., for an international summit to discuss the rapidly evolving field. We kick off the day with Edward Lanphier, CEO of Sangamo BioSciences, the first company to put a gene editing therapy into clinical trials. Then we dig into the anatomy of a CRISPR gene editing startup—two of them, actually. Out of gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna’s lab came Berkeley’s Caribou Biosciences. And Caribou, in turn, has licensed its technology for certain human treatments to Intellia Therapeutics. We’ll hear from a key scientist and an investor about getting those companies up and running.
Talking about science, business, and strategy isn’t enough, what with the rapid pace of advancement. We also need to understand the social ramifications, so we will end the forum in discussion with Stanford professor Hank Greely about the ethics of gene editing and other biotechnologies.
In between, we’ll dive deeply into the microbiome with the CEOs of two local startups—two of the few who so far have tried to harness the microbiome for human therapeutics. And we’ll hear from another pair of leaders in the space where Big Data, human genetics, and public health converge.
Atul Butte of UCSF will give us an update on his work to link the University of California’s five healthcare centers in an ambitious precision medicine initiative. And Randy Scott will talk about his company, Invitae, which aims to be the Amazon.com of the world’s genetic tests—and that’s just part one of his plan. Butte and Scott will then join veteran venture investor Nina Kjellson for a discussion about a future in which everyone’s intimate health details are up in the cloud. And we’re likely to add another element or speaker as we get closer to the event.
Disruption, its promises and consequences: You can get your tickets here. We hope you’ll join us for this Bay Area conversation on Dec. 10.
