In November I attended the Festival of Biologics (FoB) 2022 conference in Basel, Switzerland. Originally a set of different conferences (now called agendas) that has merged into a single conference, FoB focuses on anything related to biologics. One of the agendas is an antibody specific agenda, derived from the former European Antibody Congress. This year the antibodies agenda had more than 100 talks across multiple tracks, covering many different aspects of using antibodies as therapeutics, making it an exciting conference for an antibody enthusiast. However, while FoB does include talks on machine learning and bioinformatics, most are focused solely on experimental work. Another drawback is that the majority of the talks are by industry, with the few academic speakers almost all also representing a company. This meant that of the few talks about computational methods and tools for protein design, most felt more like a commercial rather than a research presentation. Nonetheless, FoB is still an interesting conference to attend when you are working on applied research for antibody therapeutics. It is an amazing opportunity to hear about which antibody specific problems companies are trying to overcome, which are deemed solved and which are the future problems to solve.
The conference followed a standard set-up, with keynotes in the morning followed by a set of different tracks for the rest of the day. A difference was the roundtables on the first day, a session where you join a table with approximately 30 people and discuss a specific subject for half an hour. This year, for me the most interesting table was “Applying AI and machine learning to Protein Design”. This is a great way to get to know people at the start of the conference who are interested in the same research as you.
A benefit of FoB being heavily attended by companies, were all the company booths, which made the breaks much more enjoyable. It was a lot of fun chatting with employees from a wide range of different drug discovery companies and getting some insight into how industrial research works. More importantly, you get to talk directly with the people who would use your work or the lab people who generate the data you work with.
In summary, FoB is definitely an interesting conference to attend if you are working with immunoinformatics or ML for drug discovery. However, it is mostly relevant if you are interested in networking with industry or in getting a better idea of what solutions industry is looking for. Essentially, the conference gives you a better sense of the grand scheme of drug discovery and your place in it.
