What is the single best thing that has happened in Seattle life sciences in the past five years? How might that make a difference over the next two decades as this region strives to become a more vibrant cluster for life sciences innovation?
These are the kinds of questions you don’t see explored much in the real-time frenzy of news headlines, the grind of quarterly earnings reports, or election seasons. But this long-range view of the future will be the central theme of an event Xconomy is organizing for Monday night here in town, under the name Seattle Life Sciences 2029.
We’re excited to have pulled together a unique mix of some of the most accomplished life sciences visionaries in the world, who have rarely, if ever, appeared together on the same stage. They are Steve Gillis of Arch Venture Partners; Ben Shapiro, former executive vice president at Merck and now a partner with Boston-based PureTech Ventures; and Stephen Friend, co-founder and CEO of Sage Bionetworks and formerly of Merck and Rosetta Inpharmatics. Carl Weissman, the chairman and CEO of Seattle-based Accelerator and a managing director with OVP Venture Partners, will be the moderator. We also expect to have a special video message from Leroy Hood, the president of the Institute for Systems Biology.
After the panel discussion, we will introduce four Seattle companies with the potential to transform their respective fields of biotech—Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, Immune Design, VLST, and VentiRx. Executives from those companies will deliver “bursts,” or brief introductions of their work, right before the networking portion of the evening.
The event will be held from 5:30 pm to 8 pm this coming Monday, Oct. 19, at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. You can get more information on how to register here. Only a few tickets are left. We expect this to be a highly interactive conversation with the audience, so if you have a question for this group, we want to hear from you. We look forward to seeing you there on Monday night.
