Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. Now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Hey, everybody. Here's the special presentation of Inside the ICE House that was recorded live before a virtual audience as part of Intercontinental Exchange's ongoing series of webcasts, bringing our customers, partners, and others, the latest information and perspectives on the coronavirus pandemic from the best experts available. These have included former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, Allianz's chief at economic advisor, Mohamed El-Erian, the CDC's, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, and past podcast guest, Tim Bowler, president of ICE Benchmark Administration offering his own take on the 2.2 trillion CARES Act. Recordings of all these events can be found on theice.com.
Josh King:
Our next episode will also feature one of these conversations given the extraordinary moves in the last several days in the oil markets, ICE's head of global oil sales, Jeff Barbuto talked with one of the world's foremost experts, Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit. Dan is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize, The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, and also The Quest, Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. And coming out in September, The New Map, Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations. Dan gave the audience an exclusive preview on his take on the volatility we're seeing every day in the oil markets. Insights we'll be sharing with you on our podcast in episode 174.
Josh King:
Today, we're going to bring you our recent exchange with Jim Greenwood, president and the CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, known inside the beltway and well beyond as BIO. Representing 1000 biotech companies, academic institutions, state biotech centers, and other organizations in the US and in more than 30 countries around the world, many deeply engaged in the fight against the coronavirus.
Josh King:
Beginning his career as a case worker with abused and neglected children and following a dozen years in the Pennsylvania general assembly and state Senate, Jim was elected to Congress representing Pennsylvania's eighth district serving from 1993 to 2005. While in Congress, Jim led legislation to reform the FDA and led the fight to allow stem cell research to help treat disease among so many other aspects of his distinguished record on Capitol Hill.
Josh King:
Jim assumed the leadership of BIO in 2005, leveraging his knowledge of politics and policy to substantially raise BIO's profile and enhancing the organization's advocacy work. Our conversation on Biotechnology's response to COVID and the current look at the developing standards to reopen the nation, that's our conversation with Jim Greenwood right after this.
Speaker 3:
Now a word from John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, NYSE ticker, DT.
John Van Siclen:
We're a software intelligence company for the enterprise cloud. Software rules the world and we bring performance and intelligence to those who develop, operate, and drive business outcomes for the digital age. We sell our products in 70 different countries. Many of our customers trade on the NYSE. It is the enterprise class customer base that we target. We're thrilled to be part of the family. Dynatrace is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
Jim Greenwood, thanks for joining us.
Jim Greenwood:
Well, I'm delighted to be here. Good morning, everyone.
Josh King:
First, Jim, on a practical and political note, we're watching every day the real tension between Washington and the governors wanting to keep people safe on the one hand, but wanting to avoid irrevocable damage to the economy on the other hand. Paige Cognetti, the new and first female mayor of Scranton has been trying to lead through the coronavirus crisis, just like Muriel Bowser in your new hometown of Washington, or Bill de Blasio in New York where we are, but with fewer resources, lots of nursing home beds, and a working class population that desperately wants to get back to work. This compared to what you've written, the problem is innocent Americans are suffocating to death from extreme respiratory distress. Give us your perspective as someone in Washington, but from well outside the largest cities about what the puts and takes are for someone like Mayor Cognetti facing these extraordinary circumstances.
Jim Greenwood:
Yeah. Just as a matter of detail. My district actually was in Southeast Pennsylvania in a place called Bucks County outside of Philadelphia. But to the question, look, if you go back to the pandemic of 1918, what you actually saw was a bell curve. Then people thought it was over and they all went out in the streets and celebrated that it was over. Then you had a huge, huge second wave, much larger than the first. That is really what we have to avoid. Even as the bell curves come down in places like New York and Chicago and the other hotspots, and there will be new hotspots that will flame up and go up and down. But even when we get to the bottom of those bell curves and the admissions in the hospitals are significantly reduced, something like 95 plus percent of us will not at least have been diagnosed with the disease. So we won't know whether we have it or not, until there's broad enough testing that we can do, serum testing to find out whether we have antibodies in our systems.
Jim Greenwood:
So the question becomes, how do we emerge from our homes and go back to the workplace? Everybody understands the unprecedented nature of this global economic shutdown, recognize also that probably lives are at stake as a result of pressures from the economy that there will be suicides and depression and addiction and so forth. So there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get back to work. Having said that the reality is that if we foolishly run out and stop our social distancing and revert to the old normal behaviors, the second wave will be worse than the first. Now we've heard from the CDC director that we may have an even worse time come next winter when we've got the flu to deal with this deal. So, that's the tension.
Jim Greenwood:
I think that the president will, as he is want to do change his tune as we move forward in time, I think, and not want to risk being held responsible if you will, for encouraging people to go out and then create that second wave. So, how do we actually get people back to work? My view is that what's going to happen is first off, we are going to need to be able to find out who among us have actually been infected, were asymptomatic and find out with some greater certainty than we have now, whether in fact that will confer immunity, that will last for at least a year or so.
Jim Greenwood:
Then I think what we're going to have to rely on, frankly, while we're waiting for the vaccines, which could be minimally nine months, probably more like a year to year and a half away, we're going to have to rely on the therapeutics that will minimize the symptoms as we do become infected. So antivirals for instance, like Remdesivir that Gilead is working on that could significantly impede the ability of the virus to replicate using anti inflammation drugs that have been used for rheumatoid arthritis that can reduce the inflammation that comes from our immune systems over response and creating cytokine storms, which seem to be a very significant contributor to the inability to breathe efficiently and need to be on a ventilator.
Jim Greenwood:
So I think what you're going to see is people will come out, there'll be hopefully enough testing, still practicing same distancing where possible, and then hopefully those who do become infected, reducing the symptoms so we don't wind up with the same kind of percentages of people in hospitals with the acute respiratory syndrome, distress syndrome and the number of percentage of dying.
Josh King:
You tweeted just a couple days ago, Jim, and I'm going to quote you, "In the fight against COVID-19 researchers and scientists may wear lab coats instead of capes, but they are all heroes just the same." It was a headline for a piece that you wrote for the Milken Institute. We had the greatest generation who led us through World War II. Many of whom came from Bucks County. Are we witnessing the creation of a new greatest generation in real time, those that are in the lab?
Jim Greenwood:
Well, I certainly think so. I'm not one who ascribes much to the notion of some generations being greater than the other. In fact just yesterday, I heard somebody say his daughter said he was among the greatest generations. He said, "If you saw the rest of the sailors on the ship I was with, you wouldn't think they were all so great." But having said that there are clearly heroic efforts underway now by the doctors and the nurses and the cleaning staff at the hospitals and the ambulance, the first responders.
Jim Greenwood:
A lot of people who if they wanted to, could sort of just dial out and just say, "I'm sick. I'm not coming in. I'm not going to risk my life." People are risking their lives and people are losing their lives in those jobs. So I hope that we do everything we possibly can to minimize their risks, to minimize their stress, to applaud and reward them and for God's sake, not putting them through subsequent rounds of these horrors.
Josh King:
I want to get into, Jim, what you're doing at BIO right now, as I said in the intro, BIO is the world's largest trade association, one of them. All of the major biotechnology companies are your members along with so many great colleges and universities and state officials and so on. Can you tell us what your approach has been to pull all of these organizations together to tackle the pandemic we're facing right now with coronavirus?
Jim Greenwood:
Sure. It may just help people to know there's a difference, I get this question a million times, difference between BIO and Pharma. So Pharma capital P, has I think 32 members right now. They're all the largest of the largest, the Pfizers and the GSK and the Mercks and AstraZeneca, etc. 28 of those 32 members are also members of BIO. Then one of the things that distinguishes us, then we have the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of smaller biotech companies, many of which are pre-revenue. So, that's a distinction.
Jim Greenwood:
So recognizing that we are the only organization on the planet that is directly connected to biotech companies, not only our 1000 members, but many smaller companies and our state affiliates that have companies that are still so early in their lives to not even be members of big bio yet. So recognizing that we said in mid February, we sent a letter out to all of our members asking which of them saw themselves participating in the fight against COVID, which had the scientific abilities, the experience in developing drugs and, or the manufacturing capacity. About 50 of those companies responded that they are engaged, tend to be engaged, maybe switching from one project into using their science for COVID.
Jim Greenwood:
Then we held a summit that was in March 24th and 25th, and about 500, initially we thought we were going to do that in person. Of course that became impossible, but we had about 500 plus folks, not only from our member companies, but from the federal government, we had Ambassador Birx there. We had the Bob Kadlec is the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness at HHS, BARDA, NIH, FDA. The whole idea was how do we maximize collaboration knowing that we're trying to develop these therapeutics and vaccines in the shortest timeframe possible? How do we share data? How do we maximize collaboration, reduce opacity, and work together?
Jim Greenwood:
I would say almost universally, as I've been talking to these member companies, I'm not going to say that they're putting commercial interests aside. That's not their purpose or nature, but they're basically saying whether we make money, lose money or break even we need to do everything we can to collaborate to get this done. So we formed three working groups, a diagnostic group, a therapeutics group, and a vaccine group. We have partnered with the Boston Consulting Group, BCG, and we're basically trying to do a set of things.
Jim Greenwood:
One, we're trying to make sure that the companies get access to the BARDA money, the billions of dollars that have been made available by Congress. So we're helping them to do that efficiently. We're also maximizing collaborations and trying to understand where the bottlenecks might be in the regulatory arenas, FDA, et cetera. We're also, we created a hub so that companies who need certain reagents, chemicals, equipment, manufacturing capacity can go onto our hub and indicate what it is they're in need of. Other companies can go onto the hub and indicate where they have access of those resources so that they can share and exchange and collaborate as effectively as possible.
Josh King:
You recently told, Jim, the Bucks County Courier Times that when this is all over, there may be something akin to the 9/11 commission to analyze what went wrong with our national response, but like 9/11, there were warnings and preparations such as the 2015 bipartisan commission on bio defense. As a member of that commission, what did you learn and say back then?
Jim Greenwood:
Well, it's really a tragic story to be perfectly frank. Back in 2014, we formed the bipartisan. Originally, it was a different name, but it is the Bipartisan Commission on Bio. It was originally Blue Ribbon Panel, but now it's the Bipartisan Commission of Biodefense. The co-chairs are Tom Ridge, former first secretary of Homeland Security and governor of Pennsylvania, friend of mine, former Senator Joe Lieberman is the other co-chair, Tom Daschle, former Senate Democratic leader, Donna Shalala, who was secretary of HHS in the past and is now a member of Congress, and myself and others.
Jim Greenwood:
We started holding hearings because what we said is we were looking at both pandemic and potential bio terror events. We spent years holding hearings with all of the experts. It was clear as anything could be that it wasn't a question if we were going to have another global pandemic. It was a question of when. For many reasons, the likelihood and the frequency and the impact of those are increasing.
Jim Greenwood:
So we put out a report actually in October of 2015, called a Blueprint for Bio Defense. We laid out a whole agenda, whole set of recommendations, including for instance, that the vice president of the United States should lead all of the planning to prepare the nation for the pandemic or bio terror event. Of course, that didn't happen until after the fact. So the planning didn't occur as it should have. We had recommendations like in urban areas, there should be a triage of hospitals. So we would identify which hospitals would be the best equipped to receive the first set of patients. Then triage those hospitals on down.
Jim Greenwood:
We also said that the national stock pile that the CDC maintains of not only medicines but personal protection equipment, of ventilators, et cetera, that they should be deployed into those hospitals and those urban areas. So, unfortunately, while the administrations took up some of our recommendations, Congress took some of our recommendations, it was not nearly enough. So tragically, when this pandemic hit, we were far less prepared than we could have been. We had an event, the commissioners had an event two years ago, 2017, more than two years ago at the National Press Club.
Jim Greenwood:
I said, at that point, "Look, members of Congress need to understand that they shouldn't expect their constituents to be knocking on their doors and calling them and saying, please prepare us for a pandemic. They don't know it's coming. They've got lives to live. But when it does come and a lot of people have died, they will be asking you, why weren't you better prepared for this than you were? You had plenty of recommendations, plenty of reports, plenty of advice, and you didn't do it."
Jim Greenwood:
So, we even went so far as to put in that first report in October of 2015, a scenario in which there's a joint meeting, a joint committee of Congress to look into the bio pandemic issue, might have been a biodefense issue, but in any case, look into it after the fact. What we said in our recommendation is don't have these hearings after the event and after people have died. Hold them now in preparation. Of course that didn't happen. So hopefully at least, and there will be more pandemics coming, we will have learned the hard way after God knows how many hundreds of thousands of deaths, what we need to do to be ready for the next.
Josh King:
Back in March you retweeted news that the biotech giant Regeneron aims to have doses of a potential COVID-19 drug ready to start human testing by early summer, which was at the time a significant acceleration of its timeline. Is that timeline still accelerated? The stock price certainly thinks it is, but what are the other therapies, treatments, or vaccines in progress, given the lens that you have on this that you're particularly excited about? When do you think we'll see those therapies implemented?
Jim Greenwood:
Yeah. So Regeneron is doing a couple of things. They're running a study and it is, I don't think they're in humans yet, but it will happen this summer with their rheumatoid arthritis drug that's designed to reduce inflammation. One of the phenomena that was observed in China in the very beginning of this thing was that patients were coming in with these cytokine storms going on in their lungs that were affecting their lungs because their immune system was over responding. So what was happening was the ability of the air sacs in the lungs to transmit oxygen into the capillaries, into the bloodstream was impeded. So what they're looking at with this drug is whether they can reduce the inflammation that results from the over responsive immune system, and thereby have patients suffer less from these acute respiratory distress syndrome episodes and less in need of ventilators.
Jim Greenwood:
The other thing that Regeneron has is this amazing transgenic mice that are designed to mimic the human immune response. So they're injecting the mice with the coronavirus to build antibodies in the mice, which are basically human antibodies because they have a human immune system built into them. The hope is that while we're waiting for a truly active vaccine that this might provide a month or two months of vaccine, if you will, prevention, protection for at least for the frontline healthcare providers. So those are both pretty exciting possibilities. Everybody's waiting for the Remdesivir product that Gilead has to see if it's going to effectively impede the ability of the coronavirus to replicate.
Jim Greenwood:
The virus's enter the human cells, what they do of course that causes all of the harm is they're able to replicate themselves. They do that by essentially mining molecules from inside the human cells. What Remdesivir does is it presents into those cells, a molecule that looks to the virus like one of its building blocks but is significantly different when it takes it and builds it into its attempt to replicate itself, it sort of puts a wrench in the works. It impedes the ability to replicate. If that happens, it has an antiviral effect, then that'll be an example of our ability to minimize the impact of the disease while we're waiting for the vaccines.
Jim Greenwood:
Then everybody's looking at Moderna with its messenger RNA approach. They've been in humans for safety testing for several weeks now. That could be a potential breakthrough. The little company in San Francisco, Vir, which is run by George Scangos who before that was the CEO of Biogen, they're working with a number of companies, including Alnylam using silencing RNA techniques to develop vaccines. So there are lots and lots and lots of shots on goals. I saw there at least 70 efforts in vaccine development, hundreds of products, hundreds of other projects underway. This is clearly an unprecedented effort by the whole biopharmaceutical industry to go at this virus, throwing everything we have at it. I'm fairly optimistic that we're going to see some really very, very promising results.
Josh King:
Can you compare the investment opportunities in pharma and biotech post COVID-19 relative to pre COVID-19?
Jim Greenwood:
Yeah, that's a good question. So as everyone knows we're at a point in history, it's a interesting point in history because the promise of the biopharmaceutical industry has never been greater. You can always say that because it's the nature of science, it builds upon itself. But when we look at gene therapy and cell therapy and immunotherapy and CRISPR, and all of the other technologies that are being brought, we're really at an inflection point I think right now in the history of our industry in terms of our abilities to innovate new products against a whole host of diseases. It may sound slightly hyperbolic when I say this, but there's no scientific reason why we can't eventually defeat every disease known to man.
Jim Greenwood:
At the same moment, we are facing the most intense political headwinds ever. Our reputation along the public is as low as it's ever been. We are massive numbers of opponents in the Congress, mostly, but not all Democrats, very, very opposed to the industry. We see that in the media, we see it among other policy makers at the state level, see it among healthcare professionals. The market has reflected that over and over again as back to the 2016 election and tweets by Hillary Clinton and by Trump would tank the biopharmaceutical market for a while.
Jim Greenwood:
So there's been a lot of hesitancy as we've faced a whole set of very draconian proposals, including HR 3 in the House, which would have done a whole lot of horrific things to the industry in terms of price controls, international price indexing, number of proposals by the president along those lines, that would have proposed a real existential threat to the industry. We had expected that last December with the wrap up of the appropriations process, that we would've faced significant legislative threats. That didn't happen. It was pushed off until May 22nd. So we figured that before May 22nd, Congress would need to raise money to pay for its repeal of the device tax repeal of the Cadillac insurance tax would have to raise money, and they would take it out of [inaudible 00:26:37] with some kinds of price controls and other legislative approaches.
Jim Greenwood:
With the virus came the three and now four consecutive huge appropriation bills with which we're all familiar. That basically took the whole issue of drug pricing off of the legislative calendar, at least I think, through the election. So the question is then, A, what happens in the election, who controls the White House, and the Congress? B, what is the attitude going to be among those elected officials toward our industry, and how does that affect our existence and attractiveness to invest in us?
Jim Greenwood:
What I hope is that as the policy makers and the public and the media witness what our industry is doing now and recognizes that we are essentially the only thing that stands between them and getting the economy back to work and saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and what we're doing is more visible, that there will be a better sense of appreciation of the expertise. The science that we bring to bear, the entrepreneurial leadership that we bring to bear, the willingness of our investors to still risk it all on us, to see the expense and the length of time it takes to develop these products. So my hope is, and I hope it's not overly optimistic that come next year, that we'll be in a better position legislatively and therefore, I think an even better investment.
Josh King:
What can Congress do to support innovation from small companies which are trying to develop new tools against the coronavirus?
Jim Greenwood:
Well, let's see. If I were in Congress next year, what would I do to help small companies? The first thing I would do is just throw aside those so many draconian price control proposals that I just mentioned. We're far less in need of special protections than we are just not being under the threat of those kinds of proposals.
Jim Greenwood:
If you ask me, why are people so mad at an industry that does more than any other to save them from death and disease and suffering? Why are we in the crosshairs? You hear constantly the notion that the drug prices are skyrocketing. The data doesn't show that at all. Drug pricing has remained relatively constant as a percentage of the healthcare spend, about 14%. The increases in the last several years have been in low single digits. So that's not really the problem.
Jim Greenwood:
What has been skyrocketing is the number of people who have health insurance policies with large deductibles. So half of the people in the country receive their health insurance from their employers are now on high deductible plans. When do people encounter those plans? They encounter those plans when they go to the drugstore. You walk into the drug store and you have your prescription or your kid's prescription, and they want $800 or something like that and you can't afford it. Who are you angry at? You're probably not angry at your insurer. You're not thinking that way. You're not angry at your employer. You're looking at this bottle of pills you either can't take home with you or you pay more than your budget can handle, and you get mad at the drug company.
Jim Greenwood:
So the most important thing Congress needs to do, and I have personally been advocating for this for a couple of years now and BIO has on the Hill, is we need to get control of the out-of-pocket expenses that patients confront starting with the Medicare system. The Medicare part D system has 45 million beneficiaries, and about a million of them pay more than $3,000 a year out of pocket. Many of them are paying five and seven to nine and $12,000 a year out of pocket. That's unconscionable. That should never be.
Jim Greenwood:
So what we've said is, Congress, put a cap on the out of pocket costs for the seniors and the disabled in the part D program. Make it something affordable, like $200 a month, and we'll pay for it. We can give discounts to the system as a whole sufficiently to pay for that. It's not very expensive. It's a two or $3 billion a year. So if Congress would do that, it would have a huge benefit. It would protect all 45 million people in the Medicare program from those kinds of expenses. It would increase adherence and compliance with prescriptions. That would in turn increase healthfulness of the beneficiaries, which would keep them out of hospitals, which would save money. So Congress should do that.
Jim Greenwood:
Then frankly, I think Congress should look at the data to see how successful that was in actually reducing healthcare costs. Then if I were in Congress, I would advocate putting a cap even on private insurers on what they can require from the pocket of patients when it comes to prescription drugs. An out-of-pocket cap makes some sense if you have skin in the game whether you decide to you twist your ankle, you're going to take an ambulance to the ER, and you're going to get a friend to take you to an urgent care center.
Jim Greenwood:
That skin in the game makes sense, but it never made sense when it comes to prescription drugs because people don't take extra drugs or more expensive drugs necessarily because of what comes out of their pocket. Surely it makes sense to have a difference between prescription drugs that are generic versus brand, but that's the single most important thing Congress could do to actually benefit patients and change the way the industry is perceived and changed the whole political arena as it comes to the biopharmaceutical industry.
Josh King:
Well, let's head over to the other side of the world for another question that we received from one of our listeners, Jim. How much cooperation are you receiving from the Chinese?
Jim Greenwood:
That's a good question. I think that it's hard to know, frankly. The Chinese have been investing in our companies pretty rigorously, robustly for some time now. But in terms of the coronavirus COVID question, we still have lots of companies who are doing business there, lots of collaborations and lots of exchange of science. I think obviously when the government intercedes, it gets in the way, and we've just seen recently where the Chinese government has strictly controlled the academic, the availability of academic research and required government approval and I presume censorship of papers if they don't comport with how the Chinese government wants to be perceived.
Jim Greenwood:
So from a governmental point of view, I think it's really hard to know when we're getting accurate information and when we're not. But I think in terms of the private sector collaborations, I think that's still working and I think it's still working pretty well.
Josh King:
Just a wrap up question that I thought about going back, looking at your Twitter feed, Jim, of the past few weeks. It's no secret that your industry and also the pharmaceutical industry sometimes get a bad rap. We've been through the opioid epidemic, which hit your home state hard. But Rich Lowry when he wrote in the New York Post a couple weeks ago was asking the following questions.
Josh King:
He said, and I quote, "When faced with what has been called a once in a generation pathogen, would we rather have a robust commercial drug industry or not? Brilliant creative people scattered throughout companies and universities working to be the first to a solution or not? Investors looking to back promising research or not?" As we wrap up, Jim, how do you think the world might see the biotech industry when we've emerged on the other side? What can those in the industry or invested in the industry do to help them?
Jim Greenwood:
Yeah, well, I couldn't have said it any better than he did and hope we hear more and more of that. One of the things I've just been talking to my staff with this morning is while we have all these members of Congress sitting at home, they can't campaign, they can't go to town meetings, how can we communicate with them? What we're trying to look at is setting up sessions where we might have like a George Scangos from Vir, and, or Len Schleifer from Regeneron or George Yancopoulos from Regeneron who would do a call like this and allow members of Congress and their staff to dial in and ask questions just like this.
Jim Greenwood:
That would give those members of Congress the opportunity to be updated so they can further update their constituents about what's going on, but also to be educated. Frequently when we meet with members of Congress that we're talking about legislative asks that we have and asking them not to harm us legislatively. Here's an opportunity for us to just say, "We're not asking for anything. We're just going to tell you what's going on, update you so you can update your constituents."
Jim Greenwood:
I think if we can do some of those kinds of meetings, it will be a real educational opportunity for members of Congress to understand how hard we work, what incredible genius we bring to the process, how risky it is that most of our projects in COVID will fail just like 90% of our projects in general fail. They'll learn how expensive and how much time it takes to do this, and hopefully have a better appreciation for us and for the industry and as I've said before, maybe take the foot off the pedal a little bit when it comes to pursuing policies that would really demolish the industry.
Josh King:
Just thinking about what you were saying about how this season that we're going through might give us a chance to do things differently than we've done it before. I think I speak for everyone on the phone as someone who knows that life is going to be different going forward. The gatherings that we used to have to share information will for a while be heading online. It's no different at BIO. Your 2020 international convention will now be BIO digital from June 8th through 12th. What do you lose by not meeting with your colleagues face to face, but what also might you gain?
Jim Greenwood:
Well, that's a great question. When we realized that we weren't going to be able to convene as we have for the last 27 years, 18 to 20,000 of us in San Diego, the staff said, "All right, well, we'll do it virtually." It seems like a very difficult thing to do and I've been in touch with a lot of other trade associations who have had to switch to virtual. We've had a lot of interest. We've had webinars to tell people how to participate.
Jim Greenwood:
We do at these meetings, our business development forum, we do 45,000 one-on-one meetings in a few days at these conventions. So there's nothing like this meeting in the world to give opportunities for people to meet and collaborate and form partnerships and deals. We'll still be able to do that virtually. We'll miss the ability to have a drink and chat informally. We'll miss the amazing parties that we throw at our conventions.
Jim Greenwood:
We're also looking in to see whether, instead of assuming that well, that since it's virtual the numbers will decline. Can we actually increase the number of participants because of the ease of participating virtually where you don't have to buy a plane ticket and get a hotel room and travel and do it full time. So if we can, we'll try to get more participants in this and will teach us something going into the future.
Josh King:
Well, into the future we all go. Thanks a lot for spending about out an hour with us, Jim, for sharing all the insights that you have and making us all a little smarter as we go about our Wednesday. It's been great having you today.
Jim Greenwood:
Well, it's my pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate those who dialed in to listen.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICE House podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the remote library of the New York Stock Exchange here in the Catskills. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
