The 19th annual BIO-Europe® international partnering conference wrapped up last week in Vienna, Austria. The conference, organized by EBD Group in collaboration with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and local host Life Science Austria Vienna (LISAvienna), featured nearly 18,000 one-to-one partnering meetings, an all-time record.

Over 3,200 delegates from 1,841 companies representing 56 countries attended. There were 184 company presentations with close to 3,600 licensing opportunities on offer and 95 exhibits at the event, Europe's largest partnering conference serving the global biotechnology industry.

"BIO-Europe was a momentous success this year. Partnering activity was unsurpassed, with the greatest number of one-to-one meetings for a life science partnering event of this caliber ever reported," said  Florian Schoenhammer, Group Managing Director, EBD Group. "Attendance at the event was up by 10%, and partnering meetings up by 20%, confirming BIO-Europe participation as a critical business development and dealmaking strategy within the industry."

Johannes Sarx, Managing Director of LISAvienna added, "More than 120 Austrian biotech companies, research and cluster organizations participated in BIO-Europe in Vienna. As host sponsor, we succeeded in putting Vienna and Austria firmly on the global life sciences map again."

In its second edition, the Academic Innovators™ track featured 11 presentations ranging from academic research institutes to research hospitals who delivered their projects with strong translational potential to leaders in pharma and biotech.

"It was our initiative to make academic organizations and translational research a core topic of the conference program," said Peter Halwachs, also Managing Director at LISAvienna. "The attendees highly appreciated this new element, a real success for us and the bio industries."

Lubor Gaal, the Head of Europe, Strategic Transactions Group at Bristol-Myers Squibb, said, "I find this meeting successful and fruitful regarding finding partners." Gaal also noted that 95% of BMS's partnering meetings focus on strategy, and 5% are opportunistic.

Marc Dunoyer, CFO of AstraZeneca, was a panelist on Tuesday's keynote that featured a discussion on transformational deals that took place in the industry in 2013. "Partnering is in line with our strategy to create collaborations with companies at the early stage through to late-stage development that are aligned with our three core therapy areas: cardiovascular and metabolic disease; respiratory, inflammation and autoimmune; and oncology," said Dunoyer.

Tony Coles, former Chair and CEO of Onyx Pharmaceuticals, gave a dynamic keynote address on the strategy he used to lead Onyx Pharmaceuticals toward success.

In addition, the winners of the first-ever Nanomedicine Award were officially announced during the nanomedicine panel at BIO-Europe. The Award Review Board agreed to distinguish two projects: Endomagnetics technology in the nanodiagnostic category and I-CARE project from Linköping University in the regenerative medicine category.

BIO-Europe 2014 will be held in Frankfurt, Germany next November

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