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.
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.
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.
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.
1) PepTalk (Protein Science & Production Week)
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.
Scale
1500+ attendees
Practical protein and biologics workflows spanning discovery through development.
Best for
Your Conference Checklist
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.
Before you go (2–4 weeks out)
Build a 3-lane agenda:
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Must-learn sessions: 3–6 talks or workshops directly relevant to your outcome
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Must-meet people: 10–15 specific individuals (speakers, poster presenters, or peers working on similar problems)
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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.
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Thermal stability: reading the unfolding curve
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There's more to explore
Discover more science-led content, practical guidance, and resources to deepen your knowledge and move your research forward with confidence.
2) World ADC London
Feb 23–26, 2026 | London, UK
What it covered
Unlocking novel payload mechanismsto combat Topo1 resistance, improving translation to clinic, and enhancing manufacturing.
Scale
800+ attendees
End-to-end ADC decision-making, from design through translation, process/analytics, and manufacturing.
Best for
3) Festival of Biologics (US & Basel)
Mar 4–5, 2026 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, USA
Oct 13–15, 2026 | Hall 1.0, Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland
What it covered
"Start-to-finish" biologics, from discovery through market access, across multiple parallel tracks.
Scale
USA
2,000+ attendees
Basel
3,000+ attendees
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).
Best for
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
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.
Best for
5) AACR Annual Meeting
Apr 17–22, 2026 | San Diego, CA, USA
What it covered
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.
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.
Best for
6) PEGS (Boston & Europe)
May 11–15, 2026 | Boston, MA, USA
What it covered
USA: Protein and antibody engineering, drug development, immunotherapy, AI/ML-driven biologics research, plus a dedicated peptide focus for 2026.
Europe: Engineering antibodies, machine learning, optimization & developability, analytical characterization, protein stability & formulation, and optimizing expression.
Scale
Boston
2,500+ attendees
Europe
1,500+ attendees
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.
Best for
7) TIDES USA
May 11–14, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
What it covered
Oligonucleotides, peptides, mRNA, genome editing, and delivery, spanning discovery through development, CMC/manufacturing, and commercialization.
Scale
1,900+ attendees
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.
Best for
8) BioProcess International (BPI)
Sep 22–25, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
What it covered
Oligonucleotides, peptides, mRNA, genome editing, and delivery, spanning discovery through development, CMC/manufacturing, and commercialization.
Scale
1,900+ attendees
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.
Best for
9) BioTechX (Boston & Basel)
Sep 29–30, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
Oct 6–8, 2026 | Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland
What it covered
Data, AI, precision medicine , genomics , and digital transformation.
Scale
Boston
1,500+ attendees
Basel
3,000+ attendees
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.
Best for
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.
While you're there
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.
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.
After the conference (within 48 hours):
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).