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The Nasdaq Stock Market, a subsidiary of The Nasdaq-Amex Market Group, is proud to bring its third annual Biotech and Infotech Summit to Northern California, one of the world’s great centers of technology and science. We founded this conference three years ago in the belief that great advances in science and genomics, including breakthrough treatments in disease, are imminent and that the convergence of information technologies and biotechnology is on track to change the world as we know it.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Strategies for Sustaining Growth and Value.” As the marketplace that is home to biotech and information technologies, Nasdaq is very cognizant of the ebb and flow in financing of the various sectors of the market. We are concerned about the slowdown of public funding in biotech. There are holes in Wall Street’s coverage of the biotech industry. Wall Street does not cover all companies. Not all investors have access to Wall Street research. One of the purposes of this Summit is to produce sound discussions of industry fundamentals that we will transcribe for investors to access on the Web.
Key Summit Support
Nasdaq could not have found more appropriate partners than the Haas School of Business and The School of Public Health at UC Berkeley – both institutions are steeped in the entrepreneurial spirit that has become synonymous with new science-based companies. The program this year is also bolstered by the commitment of a unique Advisory Board – whose members bring rich experience in running successful enterprises – but have eclectic backgrounds and interests. However diverse their skills, all the members share one common view: that private and capital market funding is the lifeblood of science. And we must continue to educate the various publics, including the legislatures and the investment community – through forums like the Nasdaq-Amex Summit – about the profound ethical and societal issues raised by this new era of science.
Nasdaq and Biotechnology
That Nasdaq should be concerned with establishing such a forum for this dynamic sector of the economy is no surprise given our continuing commitment to “invest” in science and technology companies. In fact, the biotech industry and Nasdaq both recently marked their 25 year anniversaries. We both began with just the seed of an idea – one that was ahead of its time. For Nasdaq, the idea was an alternative market structure and trading system – an electronic screen-based system for trading securities.
For the field of biology, the early 1970s saw a dramatic advance in science with the invention, in 1973, of recombinant DNA, the technique whereby a fragment of DNA could be snipped out of a genome and spliced – recombined – into another. This opened a new horizon of scientific possibilities, including the isolation of human genes and the unraveling of their functions. Soon afterwards, technologies were invented to determine the sequence of base pairs in DNA. By 1976, with seed money from the venture capital community, the first biotech company was founded – Genentech went public in 1980.
The paths and the histories of Nasdaq and the biotech industry are inextricably linked. Of the early and enthusiastic supporters of the biotech sector, the most significant were the venture capital community and The Nasdaq Stock Market. These two communities recognized the tremendous potential for the commercialization of science and medicine that would lead to future disease treatments and drug discoveries. Traditional stock markets would not list companies that did not have financial or operating histories. These biotech companies were, in fact, years, or even decades away from product development, revenues and profitability. Nasdaq permitted these companies to trade on its market, allowing them to raise financing before they had earnings. Nasdaq, in effect, capitalized a nascent industry and allowed it to thrive.
Today there are more than 1300 biotech companies in the United States, and 350 of them are public. That number dwarfs that of any other country in the world. Nasdaq-Amex is home to more than 90 percent of those companies and will welcome many more as science and biotechnology propel us into the next century.
