Shanghai – The ChinaBio® Partnering Forum, held in Shanghai on June 23-24, 2009, was called an unqualified success by co-organizers ChinaBio® LLC and EBD Group. The event, which was the first biotech/pharma partnering conference held in China, attracted 486 attendees from 272 companies and 29 countries.

“This event significantly exceeded our original projections of 300 attendees,” said Greg Scott, CEO and Founder of ChinaBio LLC. “Interest was high from both sides of the biopharma industry, with the global pharmas looking for new drug candidates and development platforms in China, and China’s biotech companies and researchers seeking partnerships to develop some highly interesting novel technologies created here.”

“Most of the global pharmaceutical companies attended the event, including Bayer, AstraZeneca, Merck, Roche, and Pfizer,” Carola Schropp, CEO and Founder of EBD Group added, “and they were actively seeking partnerships here. Nearly 600 meetings were scheduled during the Partnering Forum, which is a very strong number for a first-time event,” reported Schropp, who has organized more than 25 events with over 10,000 meetings in total.

Creating cross-border partnerships was the primary theme of the conference, which took advantage of EBD Group’s web-based partneringONE™ system to facilitate one-to-one meetings between attendees at the event. EBD pioneered automated partnering, and the attendees, many of them first-time users of partneringONE, reported that the system was easy to use and very effective at identifying potential partners they wished to meet.

“We had over 20 meetings during the ChinaBio Partnering Forum,” said Yuwen Liu, General Manager of BioBay in Suzhou, who attended the event. BioBay is the fastest growing life science park in China. “We have attended major global partnering events in the U.S., and this Forum was of the highest standard. We met several companies we expect to collaborate with in the near future.”

The ChinaBio Partnering Forum was the first time EBD Group participated in a partnering event in Asia. “We felt the combination of ChinaBio’s credibility in China biopharma and our expertise in life science partnering would produce a highly successful event, and that’s exactly what happened,” said Schropp. “We are looking forward to future, equally successful events with ChinaBio.”

The organizers have already scheduled next year’s ChinaBio Partnering Forum in Suzhou at the new Cold Spring Harbor Conference Center on June 23-24, 2010, and are organizing several other joint events. The next meeting planned by EBD Group and ChinaBio is ChinaBio® Day on September 15, which is a preconference to EBD Group’s BioPharm America™ in San Francisco.