Summit History

The Bioshares Biotech Investment Summit was founded by David Blake and Mark Pachacz, the co-editors and independent analysts behind the publication Bioshares.

The Summit was started as a way to enable investors and CEOs to meet and gain greater insights, away from day -to-day business pressures. The locations of the Summit have always centred around enabling an informal setting with the structure ensuring maximum networking, peer interaction and learnings.

The Summit started as a high-level event that has become a feature of the biotech investment calendar in Australia as well as an excellent networking opportunity. Numbers have always been held to a level that enables everyone to meet each other and have time for quality discussions.

The first Summit was held in Thredbo in 2005 (2005-2010) as a turf-neutral event for biotech investors, CEOs and those servicing the sector to meet, discuss trends and hear from emerging biotech companies.

From 2011-2019 the event was held in Queenstown, New Zealand, and in 2022 was moved to Albury, NSW, due to travel restrictions resulting from the global pandemic. The Summit is held over two days and generally features 25 speakers together with special panel sessions and separate master classes. Presentations are usually structured around central themes to explore more in-depth business operations and challenges that are relevant across many companies in the sector.

In 2012, the Summit introduced The Mike Hirshorn address in honour of an early pioneer of Australia’s biotech sector. In 2022 the Blake Award for Excellence (‘The Blakey’) was introduced in recognition of Bioshares Co-Founder David Blake and the significant impact he had on the sector. The inaugural winner in 2022 was Telix Pharmaceuticals for its stunning and rapid commercialisation of its radiopharmaceutical pipeline.

A feature of the Summit in recent years has been the introduction of the Biotech CEO Dinner which is a unique opportunity for biotech CEOs to meet and share management ideas and discuss common issues amongst themselves in a closed setting. The level of peer support and sharing of ideas has been extremely successful. In 2024, Bioshares introduced the CFO dinner in light of the successes of past CEO dinners.

The 2023 Summit was held in Hobart on 24-25 July, with a record of 200 attendees. A key focus of the 2023 Summit was attracting greater participation from institutional investors, which has been building each year.

The 2024 Summit will be held in Fremantle, WA, officially commencing on the 12-13 July, providing biotechs with the opportunity to access new retail and institutional investors in WA, and for biotechs and service providers to build closer links with a very active biotech sector in the state which enjoys strong support from the WA State Government. Additionally, the Bioshares team is looking forward to host the CFO dinner, held on 11 July.