TIMINGS:
- 6pm doors
- 6pm - 7pm Welcome reception with welcome drink on us
- 7pm - 9.30pm Bits in Bio content, bridging the biotech ecosystem with tech
- 9.30pm - 11pm After talks at Bar Bougie
COLLECTIVE INVITES BITS IN BIO
Bits in Bio is a global community that brings together people from tech and biotech industries, learn from one another, and combine the best practices of the tech world with the understanding of biology.
Beyond human health, biotechnology and biomanufacturing can help us reach our climate and energy goals, enhance food security and sustainability, secure our supply chains, and stimulate economic growth. With biology, digital technology and AI evolving at breakneck pace and reinforcing one another, we believe that we are on the eve of novel tools and methods to develop sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
BELGIUM x BIOTECH x DIGITAL TECH
Belgium is home to over 500 pharmaceutical and biotech companies in an area of just 30,280 square kilometers. From young start-ups to established local firms and multinationals, Belgium represents the entire value chain of life sciences: from research and discovery to development and commercialization. This unique ecosystem is a fertile environment for cross-pollination between world-class universities, biotech, medtech, pharmaceuticals and healthcare.
Belgium is also home to a strong digital tech startup/scaleup/service industry, and ranks very high among EU countries on the integration of digital technology. Together, these sectors provide a lot of human talent and capabilities, but they’re weakly interconnected. One reason is they pursue different goals and don’t have a common understanding of basic concepts, nor the language to exchange expertise. E.g. most ML engineers have no clue what codon usage is about, most bio-engineers haven’t heard how or why transformers took the AI world by storm in the last years. The goal of Bits in Bio is to bring bright minds from Belgium’s digital and biotech ecosystems together, learn from one another, and have a good time.
WHAT TO EXPECT?
We aim to bring together a 50/50 mixture of tech/bio enthousiasts and experts, and organise 3 talks of 20–30minutes:
- A bio-talk about key concept in Biology to inspire the techies 👩💻
- A tech-talk about a key concept in Digital Tech to inspire the scientists👩🔬
- A tech-bio talk where Digital Tech and Biology come together 🤝
In the example above, the bio-talk could be about codons, the tech-talk about product design, and a tech-bio-talk about how ML drives synthetic biology at the end.
As meetups always go, the most interesting part happens afterwards over drinks, where we get to meet and break the boundaries between bio and tech.
GUEST POLICY
Collective Members Only
