What are the key takeaways from this Beyond Biotech episode?

Key insights include: **Pre-event targeting:** Biotechs should map their disease area and development stage against the 20–40 pharma companies with publicly known pipelines in that space, then identify specific attending individuals via LinkedIn and the conference attendee list — not just company names — weeks before the event to build a structured meeting skeleton.; **Cost and timing discipline:** Conference costs are predictable months in advance — flight prices, hotel availability, and ticket early-bird discounts are all time-sensitive. Lanthaler frames late booking as a strategic failure: BIO's date and location are known a year out, so teams should lock in travel and registration three or more months ahead to control budget.; **Profile completion via AI:** Filling out partnering system company profiles is non-negotiable for maximizing meeting requests. Lanthaler dismisses the "too much work" objection entirely — any AI tool can generate a complete profile from a single prompt, removing the effort barrier and ensuring the company appears in relevant search results within the platform.

How long is this episode of Beyond Biotech?

This episode is 40 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Beyond Biotech

BIO International Convention 2026: practical advice from former Evotec CEO Werner Lanthaler

June 19, 2026

40 min episode · 2 min read

Episode

40 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Relationships, Leadership

AI-Generated Summary

Published Jun 19, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Pre-event targeting: Biotechs should map their disease area and development stage against the 20–40 pharma companies with publicly known pipelines in that space, then identify specific attending individuals via LinkedIn and the conference attendee list — not just company names — weeks before the event to build a structured meeting skeleton.
✓Cost and timing discipline: Conference costs are predictable months in advance — flight prices, hotel availability, and ticket early-bird discounts are all time-sensitive. Lanthaler frames late booking as a strategic failure: BIO's date and location are known a year out, so teams should lock in travel and registration three or more months ahead to control budget.
✓Profile completion via AI: Filling out partnering system company profiles is non-negotiable for maximizing meeting requests. Lanthaler dismisses the "too much work" objection entirely — any AI tool can generate a complete profile from a single prompt, removing the effort barrier and ensuring the company appears in relevant search results within the platform.
✓Meeting framing: A 20–30 minute partnering meeting should be positioned as the opening of a relationship, not a pitch session. Presenting 150 slides is the wrong approach. The goal is to surface the real obstacles and value proposition quickly in person, since in-person dialogue allows faster course correction than email or legal back-and-forth ever can.
✓Follow-up within one week: Any meeting worth pursuing requires follow-up within seven days of the conference. No response within 14 days typically signals low priority rather than rejection. Lanthaler recommends re-attempting contact across multiple conference cycles, noting that most successful venture rounds and BD deals required several separate initiation attempts before timing aligned.

What It Covers

Werner Lanthaler, former Evotec CEO who scaled the company from 200 employees and €40M to 5,000 staff and €800M revenue, shares practical strategies for biotechs attending the BIO International Convention in San Diego, covering preparation, on-site execution, and post-event follow-up to convert meetings into partnerships.

Key Questions Answered

•Pre-event targeting: Biotechs should map their disease area and development stage against the 20–40 pharma companies with publicly known pipelines in that space, then identify specific attending individuals via LinkedIn and the conference attendee list — not just company names — weeks before the event to build a structured meeting skeleton.
•Cost and timing discipline: Conference costs are predictable months in advance — flight prices, hotel availability, and ticket early-bird discounts are all time-sensitive. Lanthaler frames late booking as a strategic failure: BIO's date and location are known a year out, so teams should lock in travel and registration three or more months ahead to control budget.
•Profile completion via AI: Filling out partnering system company profiles is non-negotiable for maximizing meeting requests. Lanthaler dismisses the "too much work" objection entirely — any AI tool can generate a complete profile from a single prompt, removing the effort barrier and ensuring the company appears in relevant search results within the platform.
•Meeting framing: A 20–30 minute partnering meeting should be positioned as the opening of a relationship, not a pitch session. Presenting 150 slides is the wrong approach. The goal is to surface the real obstacles and value proposition quickly in person, since in-person dialogue allows faster course correction than email or legal back-and-forth ever can.
•Follow-up within one week: Any meeting worth pursuing requires follow-up within seven days of the conference. No response within 14 days typically signals low priority rather than rejection. Lanthaler recommends re-attempting contact across multiple conference cycles, noting that most successful venture rounds and BD deals required several separate initiation attempts before timing aligned.

Notable Moment

Lanthaler challenges the assumption that VCs close deals at large biotech conventions, calling that expectation overblown. He argues most financing rounds require separate, dedicated introductions outside the conference format — and that BIO functions primarily as a business development event, not a fundraising platform.

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Labiatek. I'm Dylan Kysain, and this is episode 202 for the podcast. This week, we preview the Bio International Convention starting next week in San Diego. This is the key partnering event of the year where biotechs connect with pharmaceutical companies and investors in partnering meetings, all to advance and fund innovative therapies. My guest is Werner Lantheller, founder and CEO of Wieland Holding. Werner spent fifteen years as CEO of Evotec scaling the company from 200 employees and €40,000,000 in revenue to over 5,000 staff and €800,000,000. He previously served as CFO of Intracell, overseeing its IPO and vaccine launch. And today, he leads investments and advisory in high-tech life sciences. In our interview, Werner explains why partnering events like BIO are critical to advancing science in biopharma. He shares practical advice on how biotechs can prepare before the event, succeed on-site, and follow-up to turn meetings into partnerships. He's got clear, actionable strategies to optimize your bio experience. So let's get to it with Werner Lantheller. Werner, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Hi, Dylan. How are you? Great. Werner, can maybe you could just start by telling us a little about your career journey in biotech. How did you get to where you are? So let's start from the beginning because I originally started economics and psychology. So I was far away from the world of molecules or far away from the world of curing diseases. But when I was a McKinsey consultant, I was fortunate enough to see that the world of biotech when it comes to manufacturing problems exists, and that's where was my first touch to the world of people who use science to develop products. So after being a consultant at McKinsey, I was fortunate enough to meet two professors at the university. One of them was making novel antigens, Alexander von Gaben, and the other one was making novel, adjuvants, Max Biernstiel. And I, with my layman knowledge of biotech, said, wow, that's a vaccine. And both of them said, yeah, it seems that you're the first finance person who understands something about science. Why don't we create the company here together? So that brought me into the foundation of InterCell, a vaccine company that brought several products to the market and into registration. And now there are products on the market, and I'm very happy that I was part of this important journey. And after basically transforming InterCell from a science company to a market ready company, I left InterCell, went to a drug discovery, drug development company called Evotech, where we started from a service business model to morph into a co owning and output driven business model with drug discovery and drug development partnerships out of Germany, The UK, Italy, France, and at the end also The United States. And after InterCell, which I did for about fifteen plus years, I decided to create my own company, which is VLAN Holding, …

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