Wary consumers may remember 2004 as the year an embattled drug industry produced tainted flu vaccine and admitted that blockbuster medicines like Vioxx could endanger lives. But thousands of executives flocking to a signal biotechnology conference in downtown San Francisco today will promote a different history -- a tale of medicine advancing and investors undeterred. Many participants in the JPMorgan Annual Healthcare Conference see biotech as the cure for what has been ailing big pharmaceutical firms -- including top-selling drugs that turn out to have serious side effects in some patients. Biotech, they say, is creating drugs more finely tuned to attack disease mechanisms and is developing genetic tests to identify the patients who should not take certain medicines.
