Ticket to Biotech

We decided to announce this early in hopes of first-mover advantage in the calendar competition for #JPM25 ... T2B is partnering with FleishmanHillard’s Health & Life Science Team for our second annual T2Bmeet @ JPM, at their office right near Union Square. It’s hard to overstate how big of a step up this is from last year, which was our very first in-person event (IYKYK)! Thank you, Heather Pierce, Mary Ellen Green, Kristin Kryway Hollins, Marc Longpre, and the FH team for making this possible! Like all our meetups, this will be a casual space for biopharma communicators to be among your people. Whether you identify as corp affairs, corp comms, IR, PR, media relations, or anything in between, you're invited. Local Bay Area industry comms folks should come, too. Contribute as you wish — half of all proceeds will go to Life Science Cares, which is doing phenomenal work harnessing industry resources to fight poverty. Life Science Cares Boston Life Science Cares Bay Area 🎟️ Details + RSVP: https://lu.ma/JPM2025

October's Comm Convo last week with John F.X. Heffernan, Michael Miller, and BIO's Michele Oshman was chock-full of timely takes for us biopharma communicators. Flip through below for our top 10 takeaways, and head over to T2B Slack to watch the replay if you missed the webinar.

Today is the one-year anniversary of our global Ticket to Biotech communicator community. And it's been a year of making dense memories. Time seems to go by faster as we age because many of our new memories are thin, vs. dense, meaning that "relatively little seems new, which means your brain has less to process, and time seems to have sped up." (source: https://lnkd.in/gKpwWM4S ) How to counter this? “We have to seek novelty, because this is what lays down new memories in the brain. Try new things. Do new things. Push yourself. Try to create more firsts, and more different experiences.” I've pushed myself so, so far outside my comfort zone, and just when I think I've reached my limit, there's always more I can stretch. This whole year has been one giant experiment, and it's been a beautiful new way to experience the professional side of my life. I'm proud to report that there's clear proof of concept, too. It's been a privilege to bring 662 biopharma communicators together — so far — into our community. T2B has brought myriad inspiring people into my path this year (a few of those pictured below!), and I’m grateful to have an extraordinary amount of positivity and support behind me. If you consider the whole life science ecosystem, I really believe that T2B will grow to convene thousands of people globally. And that's not even counting the long-term talent pipeline we're creating. This next year, I’ll be focused on: -Making our community sustainable -Establishing infrastructure to support continued and rapid growth -Unlocking member-driven passions and insights Together we're elevating our profession. Together we’re shaping the global life science narrative.

November will be "Measurement Month" -- not just here at T2B, but it's an actual, recognized month! Wish we could say we planned it that way, but it's really a happy coincidence. The real reasons we invited measurement researcher Angela Dwyer to be our featured speaker next month are to give us communicators a boost as we: 1. advocate for our 2025 budgets and 2. consider how to show in year-end reviews all the great ways we've added value in 2024. Join us on November 12th for our final(!) Comm Convo of 2024: https://lu.ma/NovCommConvo *This will be the last complimentary Comm Convo. Though Slack and access to some of our content will remain complimentary in 2025, to keep the T2B community sustainable, we will be transitioning to a freemium model post-JPM. More details on that coming soon!

What does "the business" mean to you as a biopharma communicator... Are you part of the business? Do you enable the business? Our Corporate Advisor Series cohort yesterday determined that the answer here is situationally dependent. With our instructor, Carly Goldsmith, PCC, we discussed how -- regardless of the situation and the audience -- some of the greatest value we can bring as leaders is asking the right questions to open up a dialogue, vs. just having a solution at the ready. What are the key questions you ask to create space for feedback and conversation?

Our industry is grappling with a trust deficit, with 43% of Americans viewing the sector as untrustworthy and 66% believing science has been politicized. At hand is a critical disconnect: while the public craves science that is transparent and accountable, they do not see biopharma as a driving force behind medical innovation. That’s a problem – not just for the industry’s future, but perhaps more importantly, for the medicines that our orgs and clients are developing. How do we reconcile deep distrust of our industry with society’s appetite for less-politicized and more highly vetted science?

Policy, Politics, and Public Perception of Biopharma We're tackling these complex issues during our October Comm Convo with expert panelists, Michele Oshman, John F.X. Heffernan, and Michael Miller. 🗓️ Thursday, October 10th 🕒 3 p.m. ET / noon PT 📍 Zoom 🎟️ Free and open to the T2B biopharma communicator community: https://lu.ma/xrbqz42m

Beyond our #JPM25 reception, we're also hosting something a little different: 🧘 Get some Zen Before JPM at a private yoga class and small-group mixer for biopharma communicators on Sunday, January 12th. 🪷 We’ve rented out a studio near downtown SF, and the session will be led by Nirel Salazar (Rillera), a local biotech scientist who’s a certified yoga instructor. 🎟️ Reserve your spot: https://lu.ma/zenb4jpm

Check out this webinar next week featuring T2B Media Minds Roundtable member Ellen Murphy. Open to HBA members ($10) and nonmembers ($20) alike, regardless if you're a biopharma communicator in your day job.

When we talk about leading others, we don't only mean direct reports. As communicators, that often means managing colleagues who we don't actually "manage" on paper. We manage up, down, and sideways our functional counterparts, internal partners, clients, and leadership teams, to name a few. In week 4 of our Corporate Advisor Series, executive coach Carly Goldsmith, PCC asked us to consider the ways that we inadvertently diminish our own power by holding onto things -- both tasks and also in the metaphorical sense -- that we may not need to.