Few people bring as much enthusiasm to their work as those in the biotech industry who seek to devise cures for disease and find new ways to provide food to the starving.
“Biotech people are on a mission with their work,” said David Miller, president of the Illinois Biotechnology Industry Organization, “and they love to talk about it.”
The biggest biotech show-and-tell session of the season will commence Wednesday evening and Thursday at Chicago’s Navy Pier. The iBIO Marketplace, as the event is called, features speeches and workshops about biotech and health-care investing.
But the event’s real meat consists of numerous presentations by people from area biotech companies who describe their firms’ business plans, the technology behind them and their progress toward getting products to market.
Although not for the general public, the iBIO Marketplace welcomes lay people who are curious about investing in biotech, Miller said.
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“Since the dot-com meltdown, a lot of people have been looking for some place to invest, and biotech just might meet their needs,” he said. “Our marketplace can serve as a window to the industry, especially for the novice.
“It gives an overview of the industry, from more mature companies to the small start-up that has just a few employees.”
Biotech has shown more life of late than most other technology enterprises or the general economy. In the last 18 months, for example, the index of biotech stocks has risen about 75 percent, said Bill Gantz, chief of Ovation Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Deerfield.
“With the improvement in stock performance, we’re starting to see some biotech IPOs in the past few weeks,” he said.
“This is very good news for the industry, because when stocks do well and initial public offerings can take start-up companies public, it lets venture capital investors see a path to liquidity for their investment,” Gantz said. “So people are optimistic that venture capital will start to flow more freely soon.”
Biotech investing typically has been cyclical, Miller said, and past cycles suggest the three-year investment drought should be about over.
Gantz, a veteran of Baxter Laboratories as well as two other biotech ventures, said the focus of biotech people on their quest to fight disease often is much more interesting to lay people than the usual business-plan pitch.
“People are trying to solve a problem, and they love to explain how it works,” he said.
Those interested in learning more about the iBIO Marketplace or in registering to attend can go to www.ibio.org.
High in protein: More stirring in the biotech sector was apparent this week as Flavin Ventures, based in Woodridge, said it would fund the start-up of Shamrock Structures, also based in Woodridge, that will specialize in the examination of protein.
The firm can provide useful information on a contract basis to outside clients, offering them specialized knowledge and skills in protein analysis.
Shamrock has an agreement to use Argonne National Laboratory’s giant X-ray facility, the advanced photon source, to identify the structure of proteins it studies. Such information can be valuable for biotech or pharmaceutical firms in developing new therapies.
Since the mapping of the human genome, much attention among scientists has focused on proteins made by genes. The study, called proteomics, has become a new buzzword in life-sciences research.
Shamrock’s deal with Argonne’s structural biology center will give its clients “access to the most advanced technologies the sciences of structural proteomics currently has to offer,” said John Flavin, managing director of Flavin Ventures.