S.D. draws interest at major health care conference
Jan. 19, 2018
This piece is presented by South Dakota Biotech.
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is the largest health care investment symposium in the industry – and attendance is by invitation only.
“We wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to meet this exclusive crowd on behalf of biotechnology in South Dakota,” said Joni Johnson, executive director of South Dakota Biotech.
Johnson and South Dakota Biotech were part of a seven-state group of BIO affiliates that hosted a reception in San Francisco for more than 800 investors, industry executives and other service providers from across the nation.
The conference drew more than 8,000 attendees, including venture capitalists and 400 companies.
“These are people who could make a significant impact on bioscience in South Dakota,” she said. “People were genuinely interested and shocked in what was happening here.”
Attendees from Sioux Falls included Eddie Sullivan, CEO of SAB Biotherapeutics, which has made news multiple times already in 2018 with successful clinical trials.
The $1 million Lorraine Cross prize for research being offered by Sanford Health also had the industry talking, Johnson said.
“What matters to people when we talk about our state is our existing medical research, our biomedical engineering community, our physicians developing technology and licensing products, and our health care systems uniquely positioned with patients for clinical trials.”