Representing Manufacturers of Veterinary Vaccines & Other Biological Products
Representing Manufacturers of Veterinary Vaccines & Other Biological Products
Meetings
The Association of Veterinary Biologics Companies meets twice a year, in the spring and fall.
The 2011 Fall meeting is scheduled for September 27 -28, in Ames, Iowa. Please contact AVBC at 703-506-1050 for more information.
2011 Spring Meeting
Ames, Iowa
April 26-27, 2011
AVBC welcomes Proliant Health and Biologicals, ProtaTek International, Inc., and KT Connection as new members.
2010 Fall Meeting
Ames, Iowa
September 7-8, 2010
2010 Spring Meeting
Ames, Iowa
April 7-8, 2010
AVBC welcomes new members.
2009 Fall Meeting
Ames, Iowa
September 29-30, 2009
AVBC welcomes new members.
Ames, Iowa
March 16-17, 2009
Please check back for further details.
Ames, Iowa
September 17-18, 2008
The 2008 Fall Meeting was held on September 17 and 18 in Ames, Iowa. We welcomed five new member companies: 3 active members, Epitopix, Hygieia Biological Laboratories, and Sirrah Bios, and two independent consultants, Espeseth Consulting and John Mitzel Consulting. Following are the opening remarks of President Ted Girshick.
“Kelli gave me an hour and a half to talk, but I’m neither creative nor
articulate enough to talk that long, so I’ll try to be brief.
Why are we here in Ames ? Why do we exist as an organization? Because 13
years ago some folks in our industry, seeing a growing threat by forces
wishing to see our industry operate under a GMP system as in Europe,
decided to establish an organization that would work to uphold the US
system of regulations based on the 9CFR . So far, we’ve been successful,
but the threat has not gone away. To the contrary, the continuing
budgetary shortfall situation that CVB has endured is only getting worse
and this has led to considerations by CVB of various means to maintain
operational integrity, including user fees or a shift towards a GMP
system.
We all know what this means:
increased costs to our firms. And with that, the repercussions of
increased prices, customer unhappiness, and even discontinued products.
I think we’ve all seen the first effects of CVB’s budgetary problems:
slowed review times and less frequent inspections, to name the
obvious. And as we’ll see in our discussions here, the situation can and
will get worse.
As we left our recent meeting with Cindy Smith and John Clifford of
APHIS, in which we beseeched them to make CVB funding APHIS’ top
priority but were told to keep working on Congress for the money, Bob
Tully turned to me and asked: “so what are you going to tell the
troops?” I hadn’t thought about that yet, but my response was that I’d
tell you all to “think of these as the “Good Old Days”. We must
re-double our efforts to convince Congress that appropriate, increased
funding for CVB is an absolute necessity and is not “pork” as we’ve
heard some in Washington believe. And it is not in the interests of “Big
Pharmaceuticals” as some others ignorantly think. But it IS for The National
Good….for our firms, for livestock producers, for pet owners, and for
ALL our citizens.
Our industry is small but extremely potent. Our products have a
far-reaching impact on our economy and all our people. How would it be
for all of us if on Thanksgiving we couldn’t enjoy our traditional
turkey, because it was either unavailable or so costly that only the
rich could enjoy it? This is not imminent but neither is it far-fetched.
We are businesses and as such have to have profits to survive. And as we
all know, this isn’t easy and it’s not forgiving. So we have to work
hard to defend ourselves in order to have that vaccine that allows that
turkey to be delivered to our table in the future.
For AVBC, it’s been a reasonably good year. We’ve gotten some new
members and have 3 new applicants today. But with over 100 licensees and
many, many allied firms, we can do much better. We all need to keep
putting the word out about AVBC and encourage others to join. We’re all
busy and have a lot of responsibilities and none of our members are AVBC
employees, but we can take the moments of opportunity to talk to
prospective members about this organization and urge them to take a look
at us. Membership is our life blood.
As touched on before, in the past year we’ve made more efforts on the
CVB funding front: letters have been written and sent to members of
Congress, we’ve aligned with the Animal Agriculture Coalition in support
of increased appropriations, and we’ve made a personal visit to APHIS
Administration. It was noted during that meeting how strange it was that
a group from industry was asking a government agency to support more
funding for themselves. Unusual it may be, but needed for our own good,
nonetheless. While I wouldn’t characterize our results a success yet, we
must continue. And as I said, we were strongly encouraged by Cindy Smith
to do so.
It’s like something I saw on Seinfeld once: Jerry’s friend George tells
him that ending a relationship is like trying to knock over a Coke
machine: you don’t just walk up to it and knock it over, you have to go
up to it and start getting it to rock. And you just keep on rocking it
until finally it reaches the tipping point and over it goes. Maybe it’s
like that with Congress…we just keep on bugging them until we accomplish
our goal.
In the past year we’ve had a couple of controversies in AVBC too. Our
position on user fees had some differences of opinion. I think we
learned something from that about effective communication within the
organization and how to do that better and also how to best achieve our
position of “One Voice” for our industry. We also had some conversations
about VICH and its usefulness or lack of, and the need to get back to
the agreed upon priorities we’ve established for our organization and
what we hope CVB will respond to positively. This will be discussed
later.
Through cost-cutting, membership restructuring, and gaining new members,
AVBC solvency is much better today than it was a year ago. Joe will show
you the numbers shortly.
Our challenges for the next year are much the same as last year. They
continue to be recruitment and CVB funding. Our goals should be to have
30 members at this meeting next year and to see a 2010 budget for CVB
that allows all positions to be filled and the new Center for Animal
Health fully operational.
Thank you.”
Ames, Iowa
April 7, 2008
The 2008 Spring meeting was held on Monday, April 7, 2008, in Ames, Iowa, in conjunction with the APHIS Public Meeting scheduled for April 7-9. We welcomed three new members: ImmuCell Corporation, Avipath, LLC and BioBusiness Consultants.
Ames, Iowa
October 29-30, 2007
The October 29-30 meeting was a great
success. We welcomed 2 new active members,
Diamond/Heska and
Newport Labs, and an
associate member, Milliken
Associates. Besides the addition of these new members, we also
approved the new membership dues structure that we believe will
encourage more firms to join our great organization in the coming
months. The work of the ad hoc committee on strategic planning was also
presented and discussed. Of particular importance was the expression of
what we, as members, feel the Center for Veterinary (CVB) priorities
should be. CVB has repeatedly sought feedback from AVBC as to what we
think their priorities should be and we will continue to emphasize these
points to Dr. Hill, Dr. Rippke, and Mr. Karli as we move forward.
Of special
interest was a lively roundtable discussion on Draft Memo 110,
in vitro potency testing.
Participants from AVBC were Tom Hickey from