As the biotech sector reels from the global financial crisis, so too are firms providing services to the industry. Williamsburg Bioprocessing Foundation (Wilbio), a private company based in Virginia Beach, Maryland, that organized meetings for firms manufacturing biological products, closed its doors June 30 after 15 years of operation. During its lifetime, Wilbio organized 13 annual conferences, consisting of traditional speaker presentations together with workshops where exhibitors showcased products. According to Keith Carson, Wilbio's founder, former chairman and CEO, the Monoclonal and Recombinant Antibodies conference was the largest, attracting 400 attendees at its peak, and other longstanding conferences included Viral Vectors and Vaccines, Cell & Tissue BioProcessing and The Baculovirus and Insect Cell Culture Conference. Laurent Humeau, vice president of research and development for Gaithersburg, Maryland–based Virxsys, a firm focusing on gene therapy using lentiviral vector delivery, says his company had been attending Wilbio conferences annually since 2002. Humeau believes that the small size of the meetings were both an advantage and a weakness for Wilbio. Carson cites several factors for the company's loss of profitability: a spate of mergers and acquisitions that ate up small companies, many of which participated as sponsors and exhibitors, layoffs and cost-cutting triggered by the financial crisis, as well as the swine flu pandemic, which may have made people reluctant to fly.