Pretty much anyone who makes a living in the pharmaceutical and biotech business, and has turned on CNBC in the past decade, knows the name Mike Huckman. He reported on the biggest developments in the cancer drug development field in those years, telling the stories of groundbreaking therapies like Eli Lilly’s Erbitux, Roche’s Avastin, and Dendreon’s Provenge.
Now I’m happy to say Huckman, a three-time Emmy Award winner, is bringing his experience and global perspective to Xconomy’s next big Boston-area event, “Boston’s War on Cancer,” on October 20. Huckman, now a senior vice president at MS&L Global Healthcare in New York, will moderate the closing keynote chat with Tyler Jacks, the director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.
Huckman is joining a stellar lineup of speakers being featured at this event, which will take place at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company in Cambridge, MA. Deborah Dunsire, Millennium’s CEO, will kick things off with a brief keynote talk about where she sees things heading in cancer R&D. We will also hear from the CEOs of some of New England’s leading startups taking lots of different tacks in the fight against cancer. The group includes Doug Fambrough of Dicerna Therapeutics, speaking on RNA interference drug development; Mark Goldsmith of Constellation Pharmaceuticals, on epigenetics; and Dave Okrongly of Quanterix, a company designing precise diagnostics to spot early signs of cancer in a drop of blood.
We’ll also hear from a panel of experienced drug developers who know all about the long, hard road a company must follow to take a drug candidate through clinical trials. This group includes Tuan Ha-Ngoc, the CEO of Cambridge-based Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AVEO]]); Adelene Perkins, CEO of Cambridge’s Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:INFI]]); Alexis Borisy, the CEO of Foundation Medicine and a partner with Boston’s Third Rock Ventures; and Nancy Simonian, the chief medical officer of Millennium‘s global cancer development operation. Sylvia Pagan Westphal, a veteran reporter from the Wall Street Journal who now writes a national life sciences column for Xconomy, will moderate.
I’ll be keeping things moving along as the emcee—and I’m looking forward to hearing what this group has to say about where things are heading in cancer research and development. This event is less than a week away, and if you haven’t registered, you can still get tickets here. See you there next Wednesday, October 20.
