Biotech tries to break bread with Silicon Valley’s disruptors. It’s awkward
AUSTIN, Texas — The multitrillion-dollar drug industry is trying to disrupt with the kids, and it’s running into a communications gap.
At SXSW, the weeklong TED Talk with a music festival in there somewhere, biotech this week has been trying to elbow its way into a conference that has ceded most of its time to tech, with its promises of a currency revolution, Martian colonization, and a hack for anything that moves.
While Uber and Spotify hosted line-out-the-door events that fit the SXSW ethos, the drug industry’s efforts have mostly amounted to awkward attempts to speak the native language, like when Bristol-Myers Squibb, a 130-year-old pharmaceutical giant, tried to entice conference-goers with a session on “hacking childhood cancer.”
There was a biotech-focused panel on drugs to stop aging. And a steeped-in-science discussion of how new technologies might be used to boost brain performance. But each was dwarfed, in interest and attendance, by tech.
The reasons for the culture collision may be self-evident.
