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Photo: The Good Day BIO convention editorial team during our daily morning meeting. Top (L to R): Theresa Brady, Connor McKoy, Molly McNulty. Bottom (L to R): Cornelia Poku, Samantha Sault, Andrew Segerman, Rufael Seyum. 

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Yesterday, BIO’s President and CEO Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath led a discussion with Black CEOs of biotechnology companies and BIO leadership: Dr. Tony Coles, CEO and Chair of the Board of Cerevel Therapeutics LLC; Dr. Ted Love, President and CEO of Global Blood Therapeutics; and Dr. Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics Inc. and Chair of the Board of BIO. 

We encourage you to watch the whole thing—it's available here.

But we want to leave you with one takeaway in language the biotech community can best understand, in the words of Dr. Coles:

We talked about the origins of this, dating back to 1619, when the first enslaved people were brought to this country and the dehumanization that was involved to consider someone else as less than a person. And we even codified that in law, it was the Three-Fifths Compromise… 

But think about what that dehumanization actually does to the psyche of the person who is dehumanizing the other. It actually mutated our social DNA as a human race. And that mutation—let’s just say it was 1619—that mutation we’ve been trying to treat with all sorts of chemotherapy, or non-specific therapies. I’m just putting it in language that we understand as a community… 

We actually thought we had targeted therapies to treat this social DNA—this mutation in the mind—called the Voting Rights Act, or the Civil Rights Act, or the anti-lynching laws, all the laws that dismantled the Jim Crow South. When, in fact, what we really needed to do was CRISPR that mutation out of our social DNA.

So, we don’t need to be embarrassed. We need to be embarrassed if we don’t do anything now, now that we understand that we were wired—and white people in particular were wired—deep in the sub-conscious in the social recess, in the social DNA that has made up America in the society that we know. You can’t help it. You didn’t even know it. We don’t walk around thinking about our genes. 

But what we should do, now that we understand this distinction—we should be embarrassed if we don’t fix it. – Dr. Tony Coles

As Dr. Michelle said, we need to heal our social genome.

– Good Day BIO Editors

1. We weren’t prepared for this pandemic—but we can learn from it, so we’re prepared in the future.

“If I were to make a plea to the investment community, your return on investment in innovative manufacturing technologies could be quite dramatic,” said Jeremy Levin, Chairman of BIO’s Board and CEO of Ovid Therapeutics Inc., in today’s session on how COVID-19 will change biomedical R&D across the globe. 

The medical professionals on the panel had a fascinating conversation on the shortcomings of the US and Europe’s response to the pandemic and how at-home diagnostics and manufacturing is likely the key that made Asia’s response so swift and strong.

2. And that future pandemic could come sooner than we think. During this morning's town hall, Dr. Peter Marks, Director of FDA’s Centers for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), talked about the agency’s COVID-19 priorities and how the pandemic will shape the new normal.

“At the end of the day, we better be putting things down in our pandemic playbook," said Dr. Marks. 

“Believe it or not, we have to be ready for the fact that a second wave could get worse,” he concluded. “If we want to do our jobs right, we have to think through all the possibilities here.”

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– Good Day BIO Editors