Translational takeaways from Grand Rounds 2024: a BioCentury podcast

How biotech can write a more successful playbook for translating from target to product

On a special edition of the BioCentury This Week podcast, BioCentury’s editors deliver their takeaways from the debut Grand Rounds conference, which brought together investors, biopharma executives and translationally-minded academics to focus on how biotech can write a more successful playbook for moving from target to product.

Weaving together takeaways from the panels, fireside chats and keynote at the conference, BioCentury’s first dedicated R&D meeting, the editors assess the tensions between generalizability and fit-for-purpose models, between having control and capturing complexity, and, in human data, between scale and robustness/reliability, particularly for longitudinal readouts.

The editors also discuss Executive Editor Selina Koch’s Q&A with USC Keck School’s Patrick Lyden, who explained how high-quality, reproducible preclinical science can be feasible. Lyden has been working with NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and several academic labs to devise a solution to one of the stroke field’s pain points: the inability to reproduce seemingly promising animal findings.

Stay tuned for information on the second annual Grand Rounds conference, coming in fall 2025.