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
What it covered:
Expression and production, higher throughput & innovation, analytics & preformulation, antibody engineering & therapeutics, plus expanded peptide focused programs
1500+ attendees
Jan 19–22, 2026 | San Diego, CA, USA
PepTalk
(Protein Science & Production Week)
Best for:
Practical protein and biologics workflows spanning discovery through development.
What it covered:
Unlocking novel payload mechanisms to combat Topo1 resistance, improving translation to clinic, and enhancing manufacturing.
800+ attendees
Feb 23–26, 2026 | London, UK
World ADC London
Best for:
End-to-end ADC decision making, from design through translation, process/analytics, and manufacturing
What it covered:
"Start-to-finish" biologics, from discovery through market access, across multiple parallel tracks.
2,000+ attendees
Mar 4–5, 2026 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, USA
Festival of Biologics
(US & Basel)
Best for:
Practical protein and biologics workflows
spanning discovery through development.
Oct 13–15, 2026 | Hall 1.0, Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland
3,000+ attendees
What it covered:
R&D, development, and manufacturing workflows for biologics, peptides, and oligonucleotides.
1,100 attendees in 2025
Mar 24–25, 2026 | London, UK
NextGen Biomed
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.
What it covered:
The cancer research community sharing advances spanning population science/prevention through cancer biology, translational, and clinical studies.
23,000 attendees
Apr 17–22, 2026 | San Diego, CA, USA
AACR 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.
1,500+ attendees
TIDES USA
May 11–14, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
Teams working across (or adjacent to)
oligos, peptides, andmRNA 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.
What it covered:
Oligonucleotides, peptides, mRNA,
genome editing,and delivery, spanning
discovery through development, CMC/manufacturing, and commercialization.
Best for:
November 2026 | Lisbon, Portugal (exact dates TBC)
What it covered:
Protein and antibody engineering, drug development, immunotherapy, AI/ML-driven biologics research, plus a dedicated peptide focus for 2026.
May 11–15, 2026 | Boston, MA, USA
What it covered:
Engineering antibodies, machine learning,
optimization & developability, analytical
characterization, protein stability & formulation, and optimizing expression.
PEGS (Boston & Europe)
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.
What it covered:
Data, AI, precision medicine, genomics, and digital transformation.
1,500+ attendees
Sep 29–30, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
BioTechX (Boston & Basel)
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.
What it covered:
Green bioprocessing, single-use systems, facility optimization, and evolving GMP/validation/QA requirements.
1,900+ attendees
Sep 22–25, 2026 | Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA, USA
BioProcess International (BPI)
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.
Your Conference Checklist
Serendipity blocks:
Protected time for posters, expo floor conversations, or unplanned hallway discussions
10–15 specific individuals (speakers, poster presenters, or peers working on similar problems)
Must-meet people
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.
Must-learn sessions
3–6 talks or workshops directly relevant to your outcome
Write three repeatable questions:
Ask the same three questions across multiple sessions. When you get comparable answers, decision-making gets a lot clearer.
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.
Use a consistent note template:
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.
