Episode 70: The 2025 Ultimate Tool for Key Opinion Leaders in Biotech – The BioPlanner

What do Elaine and I do in our day job? Well, we're launching thebioplanner.com. We're announcing our travel schedule for business development for 2025, and we want your ideas. Listen now for more.

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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Hello and welcome back to Bio from the Bayou. I'm Dr. Elaine Hamm, the Executive in Residence at Tulane University School of Medicine.

And I'm James Zanewicz, the Chief Strategy Officer at Tulane Medicine. And Elaine and I are here to talk about a new initiative we have for 2025, and I'm super, super, super excited.

Let's talk about it. So can I reveal the name now, or do you want to do the honor?

Yes, you can. You want to do the backstory first?

Let's start with the—

yeah, yeah, let's So, so when you're in business development or the CEO of a biotech company or an investor, there are so many events you often don't know where to go, how to find them, how to find out where they are, when they're happening. Does it have partnering? Is it more casual, interactive? Is it more scientific? So many questions about all these events in biotech and healthcare. And in the past, there had been the McDougall Life Science Calendar run by McDougall Biotech Consulting.

Mm-hmm.

And the entire industry turned to this. And unfortunately, last year, McDougall Dougal shut their doors. So they still have a legacy calendar up that goes somewhat into 2025, but it's going away. And as part of that, we decided to help fix that problem.

Yeah, because it can be really complicated to sort through, like, where are all the conferences? And so we really wanted to have a sort of one-stop shop. What's going on, finding the really specific niche conferences all the way to the very large ones of where you should be to make sure that your science is getting out there. Yeah.

And so as we were doing that, we were workshopping, what do we call it? Because obviously it's not just a Tulane calendar conference. It is much broader than that. We were like, Tulane BioCalendar. But it's not just about Tulane stuff here, even though we are powering it and paying for it. It's free for everyone to be able to access and get their events listed. But with that, Elaine and I went back and back and forth, and she told me many of my ideas were perhaps not big, bright, shiny stars. And we landed on Elaine. What did we land on?

We landed on Bio Planner. I mean, it makes the most sense, right? I mean, plan your bio.

Yeah.

Which is also on the on the list.

Plan your bio. So it's it's thebioplanner.com. No www. If you just go to http colon forward slash forward slash thebioplanner.com or is it backslash? Which slashes are the HTTP slashes? I don't remember. Http colon slash slash. You know the one that's for URLs and then thebioplanner.com and it takes you straight in there. You're able to look at default. To, I think, a couple-week view, but you can click on the dates and take it to any date range you want. So if you're like, I just wanna know what's in August, you can make it August 1st to August 31st. Or if you wanna look at the last quarter, you can filter by quarters. You're able to look through some of our filtering options and figure out, does it have partnering? Is it just scientific? Is it more networking? We have some simple things like that. You can see where it is. It links out to the conference websites as well. So you can go straight to their websites, register, figure that out, and you can actually favorite and save some while you're in there and actually develop a list. Of, you know, hey, while I'm in here, I can develop kind of a curated list of here are the ones that I'm interested in right now.

Yeah, I think it's gonna be super helpful. Someone that— I'm pretty stingy with my time, as you may know, of where I want, you know, what conferences I want to attend. Being a shut-in introvert, you know, if I'm gonna go outside into the world, I want to make sure that I'm going to a conference that's gonna make the most sense for what I'm wanting to accomplish. And being able to go to one website and determine that is gonna be super helpful for me. Yeah.

And so, you know, I'm looking at our thebioplanner.com website right now. And if you go in, the categories are what have, have the types they are. So we have events that are hybrid or in person. You can search for that or virtual, all virtual. We have investor financial conferences, medical scientific conferences in there. So you can kind of figure out what they are. We have where the venues are, which is where it's being held. So it's not the venue itself, but it's the city it's in. So you can say, hey, it's in Amsterdam or Anaheim or Los Angeles or New Orleans. So If you're one of those people who your time is valuable and you only want to go to conferences in cool places, you can put in the cool places you want to go and justify ways to do your job in London or in Madrid or New Orleans. We keep saying New Orleans because it's the best. But you can actually figure out ways to align your business with other things you want to do.

What I love about it too is that there's a lot of niche ones on there too, and that can be really important as you're, you know, trying to figure out where you should spend your time. If you have a very specific indication that you're working on, you can find a conference specific for that.

So with this tool, which we're, we're so excited to launch, we also have the ability to submit your own event. There's a button right up top, submit your event. We've seen other versions of this where people are charging to have events on. We're not doing that.

I'm just about to ask, how much does all of this cost, James?

It costs Tulane some money to put on because we have, you have the fee for the backend, which is Timely that we're using, same as the McDougall used on their backend. And then our amazing BD associate and his team of interns are working on pulling together the conferences. That's Dr. Alexis Takodi, who works on Dr. Hamm's team, but he scours what's out there with his interns, looks at it, makes sure that it's not bad conferences that are just out there to scam and take your money and not really good. So he's, he's kind of filtering out for that so that he, you can be sure that everything in here is quality, which is great.

Yeah, that definitely helps. You got to have the person in the loop to help make sure that it isn't just a whole bunch of things that claim that they're conferences. But yeah, free to submit your own event, which I think is great too. And we are going to have some opportunity for advertisements as well. So be thinking about that if that's something that is important to your company of being able to display where you're going to be at and your company, also an opportunity for that too.

I think it's great that we're launching into JPM, JPM Healthcare Week, which I think is amazing. So by the time this podcast airs, that will be over and done and Elaine will have successfully avoided yet another JPM and I will be exhausted from having been to another one. But yeah, it's an ideal time to do that. But as you're planning ahead for BIO International or for BIO on the Bayou, which is one of our featured events. We're able to feature events. So if it's something we view as really valuable to folks in the BD community in this space, we will highlight and feature those. Like everything's on there, but it does a nice little featured button in green around it. A lovely, what we call Mardi Gras green at Tulane. It's one of, one of our secondary brand colors. So we love it. It is just a great event and it actually lives on. Well, we do have the vanity URL of thebioplanner.com. It lives on our business development website for biotech at the School of Medicine and National Primate Research Center at Tulane, which is engage.tulane.edu. And Elaine, I know you have plans for that for the year. Do you want to talk about kind of what that's for at all and, and anything that you might have in mind for that, or is that something for another podcast?

That might be something for another podcast because we are still in the brainstorming stage. I mean, we were literally just riffing on this a few— 20 minutes ago about the ways that we can better serve the biotech community and giving them access to things that are in the Gold South region, whether that's KOLs, technologies, top 5 things going on at your university. We want to make sure that it's going to be useful for our, you know, biotech pharmaceutical partners out there that, hey, it's a one-stop shop to be able to find the other parts of the US and the things that we're doing here.

So if folks have ideas for those things, do we want them to send those in? Because we—

I would love that. That would make my brainstorming even easier. But, you know, the more minds, the better. I mean, we're just trying to find ways to connect the ones wonderful things that are going on here to the rest of the world.

We do have our Chief Strategy Officer calendar at Tulane and email, so they could email CSO for Chief Strategy Officer at tulane.edu. It's a nice generic email that won't overwhelm Elaine's inbox. It makes her very happy. But if you're out there and you're a company, you're an investor, you have ideas on ways that we can make our website or our Tulane Digest or surveys or quick polls or things that would make your life easier to access science, KOLs, tools, resources, patient populations out of Tulane University or the broader Gulf South, because we, we love helping to, to be that nexus point and convene and get everyone everywhere they need to go in the entire Gulf South, much as we do with our Bio on the Bayou conference. But if you have ideas, send them into us. We would love to hear from you.

And just to talk a little bit more about the Digest, as many of you know, we had a wonderful Digest that came out during COVID that kind of kept everyone up to date on the latest things that were going on with COVID and that's pivoted a bit into broader scientific areas. But we're going to be sending out a survey to our current subscribers to find out what are the types of topics that they would like to learn more about. The goal of the Digest is to provide nice bite-sized information about— in terms of COVID we were providing sort of the latest update so people could keep up to date with that. But we'd love to learn more of what our subscribers would like to see from us on that. And if you aren't a subscriber, that's an opportunity here for you to subscribe to that too and have a voice in that.

That's fantastic. And I think the, the last thing to leave people with really today before we do our quick summary is where we're gonna be, where they can find us for the first half of 2025.

So— Good question.

Bullpen at JPM. I'll be there the whole week. Elaine is evading it, as is her wont. If you're in DC for Washington Mardi Gras, I'll be there the week after as well. And then I'll come home exhausted. Possibly we'll be at BIO CEO and Investors, still debating that. And I'm gonna be at an AI summit in Austin, Texas at the end of February. We'll have information on that in the show notes. And Elaine, do you want to talk about our March?

So I am actually going to be participating in Resi Virtual in January, but then as it relates to March, you and I are going to be at BioEurope in Milan this year. So hopefully we can meet up with our colleagues there. Look for us in the partnering area. We'll be there to connect with our biotech.

Yeah, and I'm excited for that because people always joke and think it's a boondoggle. Then they see that we do like 80 meetings in 3 days. They're like, oh, you guys actually worked. We're like, yeah, we pretty much don't leave the hotel restaurant. We're like, hey, is there a restaurant in the hotel? Yeah, we're going there.

We're gonna go there. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And then after that, I'll be hitting BIO Trinity in London for 2 days, hitting that up, connecting with a lot of the companies in the EU again, but more from the UK perspective, from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland. Then we have our big one, BIO International, which is Boston this year, right?

It's Boston this year. Yeah. And a little bit later in June too. It's usually in the first week of June, but now it's, I think it's a little bit later.

Yeah, it's like, like mid-June, but I think that's most of our stuff for this year.

Yeah, for now.

Oh, except I lied. Carolyn Schofield and I will be towards the end of April at Fierce Pharma Engage, and we're both, I'm moderating a panel, she's speaking on a panel, and that is for communicators in pharma and biotech, but also business development professionals, medical affairs professionals, and I think they have a 4th realm there. But if people want to look up Fierce Pharma Engage, it's the first year they brought all these communities together. They were separate conferences, and I think it's really cool that they're pulling them together into kind of separate tracks in one big event, and they will have partnering as well. So these are, again, all things you can find on— wrapping it all up, all these events will be in thebioplanner.com. If you can't remember thebioplanner.com, you can remember engage.tulane.edu and click on BioPlanner at the top. You can get to the same amazing resource in multiple ways. The other thing we want to remind people of is where we're going to be for the year, and that if you have ideas, feedback, Elaine is really working on re-envisioning what we've done in the past. She and Alexis are brainstorming on this a lot. I have thoughts and ideas. They tell me they're either dumb or maybe they'll consider them, and then they do what is smart anyway. But, you know, you can email us at CSO, for Chief Strategy Officer, at tulane.edu. It may take us a minute to get back to you, but we're going to consider everything. We may follow up to get additional information, but we would really, really love to hear from you and get your input as we kind of continue to redefine, elevate, and change how an academic medical center interacts with the outside world.

Yeah. And if you have ideas for this podcast, send them our way as well. So, we're going to be looking at bringing in some new guests. We have a lot of new topics that we're going to be discussing based on your feedback. And so, If you have other ideas, love to hear them.

We have had a lot of requests for guests. People are getting to us from the website page. Feel free to email either of us. We also need to get our producer Ian's contact information up there because odds are if they reach out to him, it may get answered faster. So Ian, Ian, for our monday.com board, we need to put on there, get Ian's email on the website so people can contact you. That's a good idea.

Well, and as always, we're going to have this Some of this information in our show notes, so be sure to check them out there and wherever you find your podcasts.

Yeah, I think we turned what was just going to be a Bioplanner announcement into a new things for 2025, and I kind of love that. So I think that's our topic.

Yeah, it's very much on our mind. What are we up to? So look forward to the next coming year with you.

This is what happens when Elaine and I just sit down and lay down a podcast because the microphones aren't working right. We're like, let's just do one. Let's do none of the topics we had planned. Great things happen. Welcome to us.

Welcome to us.

Oh, boy.

And get ready for when Elaine gets a new working microphone for all the fun podcasts. Stay tuned.

Yeah, but thanks as always. And as we kick off the new year, I do want to thank our amazing producer, Ian, for all his hard work doing this, keeping us on track.

Absolutely.

He does a great job. We didn't get to do that at the end of 2024 because we had booked everything in advance. But let's kick off the new year by celebrating him. And who knows? Maybe we'll drag him out in front of the mic more because when you and I are busy, maybe we'll drag him out to host a few things and say, get to work. We'll make you a star. I'm ready. I'll do it. You know, it'll be exciting. Maybe we'll have him interview his dad. I want that to happen.

His sexy podcast voice. Got to have Dr. James McLaughlin on here.

All right. Anything else we need to lean? I feel like we wrapped up and then tangent it again. And yeah, I think we're ready to go.

Yeah. People are like, all right, get to the point.

All right.

All right, so BioPlanner, check it out. And if you have suggestions, let us know. Thanks everyone.

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