By Annabelle Kay
I am just back in Sydney after a fantastic, productive week at the BIO International Convention in San Diego, and I wanted to share a few reflections while the experience is still fresh.
#BIO2026 is a brilliant kind of chaos. With over twenty-thousand global biotech and pharma professionals descending upon the San Diego Convention Center, the energy this year was genuinely contagious. Our days were packed with fast-paced, 20-minute partnering meetings and spontaneous corridor conversations, which seamlessly transitioned into evening mixers where formality dropped away and ideas really began to flow.
Throughout the week, the DesertSci team held fifteen high-level partnering meetings with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The standard of engagement was excellent – exactly the kind of collaborative outcome you hope for from an international event of this scale.
The evening side of the BIO agenda certainly earned its place this year. DesertSci was proud to sponsor the official networking drinks session at the Australia Pavilion on Tuesday afternoon. It was a genuine highlight of our trip, boasting a fantastic turnout and no shortage of industry peers keen to hear about the enterprise software solutions DesertSci has been building.
In fact, some of the best conversations of the week happened during these relaxed mixers and receptions. Over a drink with professionals from all corners of the global life sciences sector, we had the opportunity to exchange genuine opinions on where true innovation is happening and where the industry is headed.
Between our scheduled partnering meetings, I managed to catch several excellent sessions at the BIO AI Summit. One particular standout was ‘Turning AI Hype into Real-World Breakthroughs and Measurable Value for Pharma.’ The panel lived up to its bold title, delivering a grounded, hype-free discussion focused on driving tangible R&D results in modern drug discovery.
Another insightful session utilised Benchling’s industry adoption data to map exactly where artificial intelligence is making a verifiable impact in early-stage pipelines. We also attended a strong session exploring how quantum computing might soon start to move the needle on complex molecular optimisation problems – challenges that classical computing infrastructure still struggles to solve.
The major industry shift: The overarching conversation in biotech has clearly moved on from “should we use AI?” to a much more practical inquiry: “which parts of this tech stack are actually working, and how do you prove it?”
In an interesting piece of scheduling, BIO 2026 landed right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup, which is being co-hosted across the US, Mexico, and Canada this summer. With matches playing in every hotel, bar, and restaurant across San Diego, it was hard not to draw a few parallels to our own industry.
A successful World Cup campaign is built on years of unglamorous, repetitive training that nobody ever sees, followed by a handful of high-pressure moments where split-second decisions decide everything.
Structure-based drug discovery runs on a remarkably similar logic. It requires decades of meticulous structural data collection, validation work, and quiet method-building. All of this foundational work is done in service of the critical moments when a research team needs to make a high-stakes call on a target or a lead compound with total confidence. Both arenas reward teams that have done the hard groundwork properly, long before anyone is watching, and both are a lot more fun when you are surrounded by an exceptional team.
Overall, it was a genuinely energising week in San Diego. The DesertSci team returned to Sydney with strong business leads, a clearer read on where the biotech market is heading (especially regarding validatable AI data pipelines), and a solid list of new collaborators to follow up with over the coming months.
We are incredibly excited to see where these international conversations lead and what DesertSci will build next.
For more insights follow Annabelle Kay on LinkedIn. Or, if you’d like to arrange a demonstration of DesertSci’s Proasis, please get in touch with our team.
For more insights into AI in drug discovery, computational chemistry and research-grade scientific software, follow Annabelle Kay on LinkedIn. Or, if you’d like to arrange a demonstration of DesertSci’s Proasis, please get in touch with our team.
