Taipei, Taiwan: With the two-day BioBusiness Asia conference (BBA) leading the way, Taipei's annual festival that brings together the best of all worlds under one roof - BIOTaiwan 2014 was inaugurated with massive interest and participation.

A total of 700 bio companies, 1,200 exhibitors and over 1,00,000 visitors winessed the opening ceremony that had many pioneers in the industry being felicitated for their dedicated work.

The event was opened was Taiwan's Vice President, Mr Wu Den-yih who further enhanced the vision, by visiting all the stalls and giving ample time to each company he heard from.

With this year's theme being 'Connecting to the Global Value Chain', the event kickstarted with the two-day BBA that would focus on partnerships based on the trends in the biosciences industry. The main agenda for this event would be to foster ties between Taiwan and the rest of the world.

True to its form since its inception, the event this year too will host prominent speakers from various leading companies so as to make the domestic industry and participants from across the world aware of the possibilities of growth.

The growing bio-based economy in the Asia-Pacific region will be the key topic of discussion in the first part of the conference. This event will be lead by addresses by Mr David Flores, CEO, Biocentury, Dr Ross Horsbury, Senior Vice President of Asia, Quintile's, Senior Vice President Mr Christopher Fang of DePuy Synthes at Johnson & Johnson and Mr Yiu-Lian Fong, Division Vice President of R&D at Abbott Molecular.

The event has brought together thousands of stakeholders of the life sciences industry, who will be tracking not just domestic but also global biotech industry trends at the event.

Amongst the countries participating in the event, USA, Japan, China, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia had active pavilions where discussion and one-on-one collaborations were witnessed.

Further, the event also has a series of seminars lined up titled, 'Biotech opportunities and challenges in the Asia-Pacific Region, 'Win-win partnerships through global alliances' and 'Successful strategies for biotech IPO in Taiwan.'