AdvaMed 2012, the big medtech conference for industry executives, has launched its website and is calling for proposals for program panels. Ray Briscuso, CEO of AdvaMed 2012 is interviewed by OneMedRadio where he discusses this year’s conference direction and major themes.
AdvaMed 2012 encourages prospective organizers to submit panels that are novel, timely, relevant and valuable in educational content, impart helpful lessons learned, or share proven best practices and have a global appeal. All panel proposals should include a working title and a suggested list of senior global industry and policy experts as panelists. Executive Workshop submissions should feature interactivity and may be tutorial in nature. To learn more about the panel proposal process, click here. The application deadline is March 16, 2012.
For the first time since its inception in 2007, the conference will be held outside Washington DC in a major manufacturing hub—Boston. The event will be held Oct 1 to 3 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and will feature an expanded eHealth and Health IT track, extended company presentations, a CEOs Unplugged Super Session on the exhibit hall floor, and a special “Salute to Massachusetts” closing reception. The educational program will consist of 11 tracks containing a series of 75-minute panels addressing industry advancements and challenges. Program track topics include: In Vitro Diagnostics, Key Health Policies, Business Development & Finance, Compliance Best Practices, Emerging Growth Company Issues, Executive Workshops, eHealth & Health IT, Legal, Quality, Regulatory, and Reimbursement.
More than 1,900 medical device and diagnostics professionals (including 420 CEOs, presidents and C-level executives) from over 925 companies and organizations and representing 22 countries and 38 U.S. states attended AdvaMed 2011. The opportunities for attendees to network and make business connections during the 2011 conference were greater than ever, with nearly 950 official one-to-one partnering meetings and more than 60 innovative company presentations to 200-plus venture capitalists, angel and private equity investors, bankers and senior medical technology business development executives. The conference also featured eight CEOs Unplugged sessions and hosted nearly 100 journalists onsite, including a live CNBC broadcast straight from the AdvaMed 2011 exhibit hall floor.
In additional to the panel proposal opportunity, AdvaMed 2012 sponsorship, exhibitor and company presentation opportunities are also available. To learn more about AdvaMed 2012: The MedTech Conference, visit www.AdvaMed2012.com or call 202-434-7213.
Click to hear audio and see full interview transcript below.
Brett Johnson: Hi, Brett Johnson here with OneMedRadio in New York City. Today, we are with Ray Briscuso. He is the CEO of Advamed 2012, which has become one of the preeminent medical technology conferences in the world. Its sixth conference will be coming up in Boston, the first time in Boston in October. Ray, thanks for joining us today.
Ray Briscuso: My pleasure. Happy to be here.
BJ: So, Ray, five years of success, growth in DC, now you’re making the move to Boston, can you tell us a little bit about what’s behind that?
RB: Yes. As you mentioned, we’ve had five years. We’ve had growth every year, we’ve been really excited by that, but, you know, we stopped and asked ourselves how many local medical device manufacturers or diagnostic companies that are in Washington DC, the answer is pretty easy, there are none. There’s a lot of lobbying off there and so forth but we thought that we should take it to a cluster and the Boston community welcomed us without a problem. It’s probably the world’s leading life science cluster. It’s the home of many leading companies, Covidien and Philips, Boston Scientific, Abiomed, J&J, Depuys got a big facility there, Smith and Nephews is out there, Bar is out there. It’s too important of an area for us to not consider and this year we’ll take the conference there October 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.
BJ: Terrific. So what are sort of the major themes of the conference or the major kind of components of the AdvaMed 2012 conference?
RB: Great question. There are several components of it that are very consistent. We always bring the latest in the trends as far as the policy changes and what’s happened at the FDA. We have to educate people as to how their business needs to change to keep up with new regulations and so we have a large regulatory component of the conference. We have a major reimbursement component. We talk about coding payment and getting reimbursed for your, pay for your product. We are bringing the latest areas in compliance and legal and we have a huge business development piece of the business so that if you’re looking for investment, if you’re looking for collaborative licensing deals, in licensing, out licensing, exit strategies, we provide all of that. I think the important thing is it’s tough for companies in this industry. You can’t go to a reimbursement conference one day and then a reimbursement the next and then a legal the following so we actually do everything at once. We bring the entire industry, the large strategics, the early stage, the investors, the angels, the private equity all together for three days of concentrated business development, educational, and networking.
BJ: So I know that creating a platform for some of the promising companies with technologies to network with strategic partners has been a big thrust for you guys. Can you talk a little bit about how that whole business development track and program works and how that’s evolved over the years?
RB: Yes. We’d be happy to. What we’ve done there is we’ve started out with really going to the large strategics and talking to them about how attractive they are, the small companies who want to meet them. Luckily, you know, the conference is part of the AdvaMed, the trade association which is 38 years old. We have 22 of the 25 largest device manufacturers as members. We have all 10 of the 10 largest diagnostic companies. So we’ve got about 65 members that do more than $100M a year in sales in the US alone.
We talked to them about how with the capital markets being tight, companies are looking for more aggressive ways to meet the strategics to talk about partnering, licensing, investment deals and basically said to them we wanted them to commit sending their business development teams to the conference. If they would do that once a year, we would efficiently allow them to meet potential partners that might come from Cambridge, Massachusetts or Cambridge, England or from Irvine, California or from Mountain View or from Alachua, Florida or from New Zealand, Australia. They like the idea of trying to come to one spot and doing lots of meetings rather than traveling all over the world.
So we actually have part of the conference, we build down 45 little meeting rooms or little suites, if you will, with tables and chairs and the large strategics will come and they can literally go from one 30-minute meeting to another to another to another so in two hours, they’ve met with four companies. It goes both ways. If you’re a small orthopedic company and you want to meet with Stryker and Zimmer and BioMet and DePuy, it means you can come to one place and meet with all of them as well as potential angels, VCs, and private equity. So it’s a major thrust of the conference. It’s grown considerably. Last year, we did 960 of these little 30-minute meetings and we certainly anticipate that will significantly grow in Boston.
BJ: Now another element I know you had a chance for a company, smaller companies to present at the conference. You had actually a presentation track for growth companies. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
RB: Yes. We work with those same strategics and we break them down by segment. So we might have an ophthalmic section and we’ll have one of the leading ophthalmology companies, maybe Abbott, their AMO division, or we’ll have Alcon or someone that will speak for a few minutes about the sector. Then, we’ll have six to eight to ten early stage ophthalmic companies each get up and make 10-minute presentations and the thought is that the audience is really full of people that are interested in that particular sector. Then we might then bring in somebody from an orthopedic company. Maybe Zimmer will stand up and speak for a little bit and then we might have the same thing six, eight, ten, twelve orthopedic companies will all present for 10 minutes and we run those for two full days. We pretty much hit the major sectors of the industry from diagnostic to ophthalmic to orthopedic to tools to, I don’t know, you name it. We try to give people opportunity. Last year, we had probably about 60 of these spots and hopefully this next year, we’re going to try to grow it, provide more. There’s a tremendous demand for those opportunities. So we welcome people who are interested to go online and look for our website and apply and hopefully they’ll have a chance to present.
BJ: It looks like you get a number of different countries that have come. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happening internationally and how you guys are appealing to the international markets?
RB: Yes, I’ll be glad to. There are a large number of obviously countries that have a large concentration of medical device businesses and we’ve often been able to deal then with economic trade offices that will bring delegations of companies that are looking to either enter the US market or they’re looking to find partners in the US or they’re looking to license technologies to introduce back in their regions. But we’ve traditionally had delegations from the UK, from New Zealand, from Israel, from Canada. We’ve had Brazilian delegations. We get a delegation every year from Switzerland and of course, we get a lot of just small individual companies that come on their own. But we’ve been really fortunate that there have been concerted groups from some of these countries. So we have French delegation as well. They’ll be coming back again. I think we’ll have a German delegation this year. So for any of your listeners that are outside the US, there’s often a way for them to become part of a delegation that often includes additional benefits usually stuff at the embassy or sometimes we get financial help.
We’re interested in making the conference as international as possible because people are doing business all over the world. Some of our sessions are educational sessions that do deal with non-US issues. We’ve had speakers from Nice, we’ve had from the UK, we’ve had the NHS, we’ve had ministers from Canada part of the conference, French ministers, Chinese officials, FDA officials from China, Japan. So it’s a very efficient one place, one time to come and learn about the industry all over the world.
BJ: Good. Now you’ve really done an excellent job over the years in getting some truly brand name, very prominent keynote speakers. The last three presidents have been participants in the conference. Do you expect to keep that trend alive?
RB: We absolutely will do that because I think the hallmark of our conference is that we attract the CEOs of the big companies and people consistently tell us that what they like most about coming to our conference is they can actually talk to the CEOs and the heads of business development. We’re able to keep those people at the conference by having the FDA commissioners followed by the CMS administrators followed by a Bill Clinton or a George Bush and yes, we’ve had the last three presidents. This year, I think we’ll actually go outside the US. We’re looking at bringing a head of state from another major strategically important country. People can count on having world class plenary speakers at the conference.
BJ: Terrific. I know that you’ve also done — in recent conferences, you tend to have some excellent networking sessions often connected to some of the embassies. I guess that’s easier to do when in DC. Do you expect to continue to have some networking sessions this year in and around the Boston area and can you talk a little bit about the venue?
RB: Yes. The venue is fantastic. It’s a relatively new convention and exhibition center in Boston directly connected to a beautiful Westin and other hotels and it’s a short walk to the waterfront. So we’re looking at some fantastic venues. For instance, the flagship restaurant of Legal Seafoods are probably one of our venues. But, it will clearly be there on the Boston Harbor, but you’ll turn to your left and hopefully you’ll have a top executive from a company you want talk to and to your right, you’ll have somebody from a venture or angel or a private equity fund. So I can assure you that the Boston community is going to make sure that nobody is upset that we left Washington DC. We’ll leave no stone unturned to make it as valuable as possible for networking, educational, and business development opportunities.
BJ: Well I think that sounds absolutely terrific and we look forward to learning more as you get closer to the conference with some more updates here in OneMed Radio about some of the developments and some of the programming advances. Thanks for joining us today, Ray.
RB: My pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you very much, Brett.
BJ: So that was Ray Briscuso who is CEO of Advamed 2012 talking about the sixth annual conference which this year will be in Boston, Massachusetts on the 1st to the 2nd of October. I’m Brett Johnson in New York with OneMedRadio signing off.