Below you'll find the 9 biologics conferences worth your time in 2026, what you'll get from each one, and a practical checklist so you walk away with actionable insights, not just a tote bag. 

Your 2026 Biologics Conference Guide: 9 meetings worth your time (and how to actually use them) 

Show up with a plan. Come back with decisions. 
Biologics R&D moves fast, and conferences remain one of the best ways to benchmark what "good" looks like, spot emerging best practices early, and reality-check your assumption before they turn into expensive experiments. 

Jan 19–22, 2026 | San Diego, CA, USA 

What it covered: Expression and production, higher throughput & innovation, analytics & preformulation, antibody engineering & therapeutics, plus expanded peptide focused programs.

Best for: Practical protein and biologics workflows spanning discovery through development.

Scale: 1500+ attendees

Feb 23–26, 2026 | London, UK 


What it covered: 
Unlocking novel payload mechanisms to combat Topo1 resistance, improving translation to clinic, and enhancing manufacturing.

Best for: End-to-end ADC decision making, from design through translation, process/analytics, and manufacturing.

Scale: 800+ attendees

2) World ADC London 

3) Festival of Biologics (US & Basel) 

4) NextGen Biomed 

Mar 24–25, 2026 | London, UK 

What it covered: R&D, development, and manufacturing workflows for biologics, peptides, and oligonucleotides.


Scale: 1,100 attendees in 2025


Best for: Sessions that give you a concrete playbook for reducing friction in tech transfer. This pain point is explicitly addressed by organizers, which means you'll find people actively working on solutions.

5) AACR Annual Meeting

6)  PEGS (Boston & Europe) 

7) TIDES USA 

8) BioProcess International (BPI) 

9) BioTechX (Boston & Basel)

1) PepTalk (Protein Science & Production Week) 

Mar 4–5, 2026 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, USA 
Scale: 2,000+ attendees  

Oct 13–15, 2026 | Hall 1.0, Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland 
Scale: 3,000+ attendees 


What it covers: "Start-to-finish" biologics, from discovery through market access, across multiple parallel tracks. 

Best for: Broad scanning and cross-functional networking across the entire biologics value chain. Upstream science in the same week as downstream constraints (CMC, manufacturing, fill/finish, market access). 

Apr 17–22, 2026 | San Diego, CA, USA 

What it covers: The cancer research community sharing advances spanning population science/prevention through cancer biology, translational, and clinical studies.


Scale: More than 23,000 attendees reported for the 2024 annual meeting.


Best for: Translational signal. This is where you see targets, mechanisms, and biomarker direction-of-travel that will shape biologics pipelines 12 to 24 months from now. Don't miss posters in your therapeutic niche. The "next wave" of biologics often shows up here first, before it makes it into high-profile talks or publications. 

May 11–15, 2026 | Boston, MA, USA 

Scale: 2,500+ attendees  

What it covers: Protein and antibody engineering, drug development, immunotherapy, AI/ML-driven biologics research, plus a dedicated peptide focus for 2026.

November 2026 | Lisbon, Portugal (exact dates TBC) 

Scale: 1,500+ attendees 


 What it covers: Engineering antibodies, machine learning, optimization & developability, analytical characterization, protein stability & formulation, and optimizing expression.

Best for: Deep engineering and developability trade-offs. This is the "how do teams actually decide?" meeting. Don't miss developability and analytical characterization sessions, especially case studies that include failures. These are the most transferable to real programs because they show you what didn't work and why. 

May 11–14, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA 

What it covers: Oligonucleotides, peptides, mRNA, genome editing, and delivery, spanning discovery through development, CMC/manufacturing, and commercialization.

Scale: 1,900+ attendees 

Best for: Teams working across (or adjacent to) oligos, peptides, and mRNA who need practical, end-to-end visibility, especially where delivery and CMC constraints dominate decisions. CMC and delivery discussions. These sessions often define feasibility more than the "headline" mechanism. Pay attention to talks that discuss what happened between the proof-of-concept data and the IND filing.

Sep 22–25, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA 

What it covers: Green bioprocessing, single-use systems, facility optimization, and evolving GMP/validation/QA requirements.

Scale: 1,900+ attendees 

Best for: Scale-up reality checks. This is where you learn about robustness, manufacturing constraints, and what "production ready" actually means in practice. Don't miss: Sessions that explicitly connect process choices to validation and QA requirements. Timelines are won or lost here, not in the upstream optimization work. 

Sep 29–30, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA

Scale: 1,500+ attendees 

Oct 6–8, 2026 | Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland 

Scale: 3,000+ attendees 


 What it covers: Data, AI, precision medicine, genomics, and digital transformation.

Best for: Deep engineering and developability trade-offs. This is the "how do teams actually decide?" meeting. Don't miss developability and analytical characterization sessions, especially case studies that include failures. These are the most transferable to real programs because they show you what didn't work and why. 

Your Conference Checklist

Before you go (2–4 weeks out)

Define one outcome:

Pick one concrete thing you want to improve. Examples: a new developability gate, a better stability-screen strategy, or a specific CMC risk you need to reduce.

Build a 3-lane agenda:

  • Must-learn sessions: 3–6 talks or workshops directly relevant to your outcome
  • Must-meet people: 10–15 specific individuals (speakers, poster presenters, or peers working on similar problems)
  • Serendipity blocks: Protected time for posters, expo floor conversations, or unplanned hallway discussions

Write three repeatable questions:

Ask the same three questions across multiple sessions. When you get comparable answers, decision-making gets a lot clearer. 

While you're there:

Use a consistent note template: For every session or conversation, capture: Problem → Approach → Result → Caveat → "Try this Monday" This structure forces you to extract the actionable piece, not just collect information.

Schedule at least one deep-dive conversation per day: The most useful details rarely make it onto slides. Find one person per day and go deeper on the thing that matters most to your work right now.

After the conference (within 48 hours):

Send 5–10 follow-ups: Each one should include a clear next step and a proposed time. "Let's stay in touch" doesn't work. "Can we schedule 30 minutes in the next two weeks to discuss your ADC linker stability data?" does. 

Deliver a one-slide readout to your team: Three insights. Three risks. Three actions. Keep it tight so people actually read it (and so you're forced to prioritize what really matters).

Make 2026 Count

Conferences are an investment of time, budget, and focus. Use this guide to show up with intention, ask better questions, and come back with decisions that move your science forward.

Which conferences are on your 2026 calendar? If you're tackling tough characterization questions at any of these events, we'd love to continue the conversation. See you out there!