Developing a Partnering Playbook for Rare Disease Innovation

In biopharma, great science is meaningless if patients can't benefit from the results. But most companies simply do not have unlimited resources dedicated to support clinical innovations. Strategic alliances and partnerships are thus the mainstay of product development, and are increasingly necessary for success. Yet as alliance professionals all know, partnering is hard! And that's especially true in the area of rare disease.

Jeff Livingstone, CEO of Igia Pharmaceuticals and of LBR Regulatory & Clinical, will discuss how he and his Igia team developed a playbook for everything that's hard about partnering in rare disease, including focusing on the right asset, finding and managing the channel, and using alliance management core capabilities to educate and drive change and innovation in this space.

Conference Keynote:

Jeff Livingstone, PhD
CEO
Igia Pharmaceuticals

Jeff Livingstone, PhD, is the CEO of Igia Pharmaceuticals, a pediatric rare disease company developing a novel therapy to address hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in infants and children with Noonan syndrome or Noonan syndrome with multiple lentigines. He is also CEO of Igia's parent company LBR, a specialty clinical and regulatory development organization.

For nearly three decades Dr. Livingstone has been involved in drug research and development on both the technical and commercial sides. He has 20 years of corporate development and new venture strategy experience across a wide variety of business types, from small privately owned companies to global divisions of large public corporations. As a former member of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and regular participant in the MIT Enterprise Forum, Dr. Livingstone also helped to establish several new companies, including Xpogen and CyberMedica.

Dr. Livingstone received his PhD in physical biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his BS in biochemistry from the University of Missouri at Columbia.