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| Cynthia Cheatham '07, a DC native, works at BIO, a trade association for biotechnology, as director of industry research and education. Cheatham confers with research scientists, medical doctors, CEOs, consultants, and communications firms to create products and events for people working in healthcare and the life sciences. |
| Starting in March, BIO created a coronavirus hub to help coordinate supplies of personal protective equipment and other materials like reagents and chemicals amongst pharmaceutical companies. BIO's industry research team also released a COVID-19 pipeline tracker in May that showcases the development of various vaccines and therapeutics for the novel disease. This tracker can specifically help someone outside of the biotech industry follow development updates and compare the progress of companies' drug development timelines. |
| "There's a lot that BIO is doing because we're basically the largest trade association for biotechnology in the world," Cheatham said. "We're based in the US, but we have members in 30 countries. We work with law firms and state trade associations in a huge ecosystem. Even though we're a trade association, we work to put all of the information out there to help surface the conversations that people want to have." |
| Cheatham and her team specifically focus on event programming for the association. As BIO shifted to online platforms for its events during the pandemic, they recorded more than seventy on-demand virtual sessions to continue the important work of innovation including topics centered around vaccine development and therapeutics for COVID-19. |
| "During this time, while companies reallocated their budget to focus on this pandemic response, there are still a lot of diseases and illnesses that need to be treated," she said. "There's still a lot of patients that need to be responded to. So how are we making sure that the work and conversations that still need to happen, are ongoing while also responding to a pandemic? What if people have lost their health insurance because they're no longer employed, how can they get access to the medicines that they need? We work to make sure that the topics we choose help garner conversations around these important issues." |
| As Cheatham reflected on her role in the biotech industry during a pandemic, especially through her lens as a social scientist, she emphasized the importance of an organization working to educate the public while acknowledging that information and accepted practices around novel disease will change. |
| "We want to educate our industry partners and policymakers and we want people to understand this," Cheatham explained. "We also want people to understand that we're also trying to figure it out. If you hear public health officials say we don't know, we're figuring it out as we go, know it's important to actually say that because you don't want to be definitive about something that's constantly changing. If you're dealing with something unknown, you don't want someone to come in and say, I know everything about this, that's dangerous. But I think what's inspiring to me is that doctors, researchers, and healthcare workers are figuring it out. We're trying and doing that in a public way is really helpful." |
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