March 15, 2017 – The 15th BioCapital Europe Conference took place at the prestigious The Grand Hotel (Sofitel) in Amsterdam. The conference is organized by LSP and this year attracted a record breaking attendance. During the day, over 250 entrepreneurs, senior executives and life science investors packed the presentation rooms and conducted one-on-one meetings.  

 

The atmospheric venue proved to be an ideal setting for a professional get-together in the world of life sciences – providing for important updates on the presenting companies and more impromptu business discussions. Around 40 CEOs of innovative European life science companies presented their investment cases in 3 parallel presentation tracks; Medical Device companies, private therapeutics companies and publically listed companies. The key theme of the conference was, as always, innovation to drive improvements in healthcare.  

 

Keynote events provided added insights

There were two keynote events during the day. Avril Daly CEO of Retina International and VP of EURODIS. Avril spoke of the need for patient advocacy groups to be involved with drug development companies so that patients’ needs are taken into account early in the process. Patient advocacy groups are particularly important in the development of drugs for rare diseases. The second key event of the day was the healthcare panel. Michael Vlemmix (KBC) and Stephanie Put (Degroof Petercam) represented the healthcare analyst perspective, Jan de Kerpel (Kempen) corporate finance in Europe and Michael Rice (LifeSci Advisors) spoke of the healthcare sector in the US. The lively panel discussion was moderated by Sam Fazeli (Bloomberg) and Geraldine O’Keeffe (LSP). 

 

And the company of the year award goes to…

LSP also introduced a conference app. One of the major benefits of the app is that it allowed conference delegates to vote for the LSP BioCapital Europe Company of the Year. This year the award went to Merus. The prize was well deserved by this innovative oncology company for the advances it has made in drug development and also for a stellar deal they recently announced with US company Incyte.  

 

Keep an eye out for notifications for BioCapital Europe 2018 (the date has yet to be announced) which we hope will build further on the success of this year’s conference.