By Angus McQuilken, vice president for communications, Mass. Life Sciences Center
The BIO International 2010 convention got underway this week in Chicago, and the Bay State once again has a strong presence at the show. The Massachusetts Pavilion, a 2,300-square-foot space on the show floor, has been a busy place on this first full day of the convention.
The Mass. Life Sciences Center is once again coordinating the Massachusetts presence at the show, working in partnership with MassBio and the Mass. Office of International Trade & Investment. The Commonwealth’s strategy this year is to focus on international partnership opportunities and to share with international firms why Massachusetts is such a great place for life sciences companies to do business.
Toward that end, the week kicked off with a joint reception sponsored by MOITI and the state of Victoria, Australia, the evening of May 2 at the Rookery, a well-known Chicago landmark. More than 100 participants from Massachusetts and Australia gathered to meet and open up opportunities for dialogue between these regions, which are aligned as partners in the life sciences through a memorandum of understanding.
Today the show floor opened, and the international focus was extended to the Massachusetts pavilion. MOITI sponsored Global Connect, a series of one-on-one business development meetings between international companies and Massachusetts officials. Several of these companies are considering where to establish a US headquarters in the short term.
The Global Connect sessions were followed by a town hall forum, kicked off and moderated by Life Sciences Center president & CEO Susan Windham-Bannister and anchored by MOITI executive director Ted Carr. In between, the audience heard form three international companies that have decided to locate their U.S. or North American headquarters in Massachusetts: CYTOO, a French biotech company that recently located their U.S. subsidiary in Framingham; Systagenix, a U.K.-based medical device company that located their headquarters for the Americas this past year in Quincy; and Ceiba Solutions, a company that also has operations in New Zealand but is now based in Cambridge. All three related why they chose Massachusetts as their entry point into the American market.