Memories of John Martin, plus AACR’s hot targets and a Bio€quity Europe preview: a BioCentury podcast
By Jeff Cranmer, Executive Editor
April 6, 2021 1:29 AM UTC
John Martin, groundbreaking chemist, prodigious dealmaker and relentless advocate for access to therapies, is the focus of the latest BioCentury This Week podcast. BioCentury’s editors discuss the legacy of the former Gilead chairman and CEO, who passed away last week at 69.
They also preview the upcoming AACR and Bio€quity Europe conferences and, for this week’s Deal in Focus, dig into AbCellera’s partnering strategy.
Executive Editor Jeff Cranmer discusses with Associate Editor Virginia Li what he learned from the friends, colleagues and peers of John Martin, who led Gilead Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) for two decades. Martin, they say, was a visionary leader, an A+ chemist and a risk-taker who transformed Gilead from a fledgling antisense play into an antiviral company valued at more than $100 billion. His drugs turned HIV into a manageable condition and cured HCV.
As importantly, under Martin’s leadership the path-cutting biotech helped establish new ways to ensure that patients the world over had access to the company’s drugs at the same time as patients in the U.S.
Looking ahead to this Saturday’s start of the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, Senior Editor Lauren Martz says she’s most excited about how data at the conference will showcase the evolution of drug development around two “incredibly important” targets: KRAS and TIGIT. She also breaks down what to expect from the next wave of protein degradation companies.
Turning to BioCentury’s own spring conference, Executive Director Josh Berlin previews this year’s Bio€quity Europe conference, which will feature more than 120 presenting companies, exclusive “scene-setter” reports on finance and dealmaking created by BioCentury’s editorial team and a keynote address by BioCentury’s insights partner McKinsey & Co. on Europe’s innovation hot spots.
Berlin notes that there will also be three-days’ worth of panel discussions focused on Europe’s Next Act, the conference’s theme for 2021. Among the featured panels are a session moderated by BioCentury Editor in Chief Simone Fishburn on her editorial team’s reports, Senior Editor Karen Tkach Tuzman’s roundtable featuring Europe’s young entrepreneurs and a “point-counterpoint” session featuring Sofinnova Partners’ Antoine Papiernik and Atlas Venture’s Bruce Booth.
Other featured faculty at the all-digital event, which is scheduled for May 17-19, include leading European VCs Kate Bingham and Carole Nuechterlein and BioCentury Chairman Karen Bernstein.
Early registrants, says Berlin, can begin taking advantage of Bio€quity’s partnering platform to set up one-on-one meetings with presenting companies starting immediately.
Finally, in this week’s Deal in Focus, Cranmer and Li check in with AbCellera Biologics Inc. (NASDAQ:ABCL), which last week partnered for a second time with Gilead. The deal underscores how fruitful AbCellera’s growing tool kit, built in part thanks to M&A, has become.
