2012 & 2013 Dates Announced!

2nd Annual Disruptive Innovations to Advance Clinical Trials for Pharma, Biologics & Devices

#DPharm

September 13th & 14th 2012

Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, MA

3rd Annual Executing Global Clinical Trials 

#GCT

September 13th & 14th 2012

Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, MA

2nd Annual PODD; Partnership Opportunities in Drug Delivery

#PODD

October 1st & 2nd 2012

Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, MA

2nd Annual How to Build a Biotech Company 101

#Biobiz101

January 8th, 2013

Marines Memorial Club & Hotel, San Francisco, CA

3rd Annual New Paradigms to Fund and Move Drug Development

#NewParadigms

January 8th - 10th, 2013

Marines Memorial Club & Hotel, San Francisco, CA

R&D Leadership Summit 2012

The Times Are A Changin' In Drug Development R&D

March 27, 2012

By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader magazine

This year's R&D Leadership Summit took place March 19 to 20 in Aventura, FL. Organized by The Conference Forum and sponsored by RPS, the focus was on driving innovation, change, and performance of drug development and discovery. The summit is by invitation only. Thus, I was delighted that Life Science Leader magazine was asked to attend for a second year in a row. Valerie Bowling, executive director for content and program management, created this c-level event with a goal of fostering an environment that not only inspires leaders, but provides support in advancing positive change to drug R&D. It seems to be working, as this year's event had increased attendance over the previous year, with executives from academia, big pharma, biotechs, research foundations, and venture capitalists. So why did all these folks want to get together? Because as Bob Dylan once said, "The times – they are a changin'."


The Future Of Drug R&D Requires Transformation

Ken Getz, senior research fellow at Tufts CSDD, served as the summit's chairperson and kicked the meeting off by having Peter Corr, Ph.D., cofounder and managing general manager with Celtic Therapeutics, conduct a presentation on future challenges, opportunities, and trends in drug development R&D. According to Corr, pharma needs to "dramatically transform" both internally and externally in order to be successful. With regard to internal, Corr is referring to a company's internal R&D programs and believes companies need to transform culture, size, and incentives. Specifically, pharma needs to make R&D smaller, i.e. smaller budgets and smaller, more nimble teams. Further, he thinks in order to foster and innovative culture, there needs to be fewer layers, fewer review committees, and empowerment of scientific leaders — all the way down to the study site. To make the small R&D teams successful, he advises leaders to disconnect them from being viewed as profit and loss (P&L) centers while fashioning individualized incentive plans based on real value creation — not entitlement.

From an external transformation perspective, Corr bulleted a variety of suggestions on how this could be done, such as moving toward open innovation models. What made Corr's talk so impactful was how it effectively set the stage for later presentations where pharma and bio executives outlined how their companies are innovating drug development R&D.

Transformation In Action

One of Corr's suggestions for external transformation was to build collaborations with academic centers. Tony Coyle, Ph.D., VP and chief scientific officer for Pfizer's center for therapeutic innovation (CTI), explained how his company is partnering with top academic institutions to provide funding for IND-enabling activities with a focus on discovery up to phase 1.

Lee Shorter, Ph.D., director disruptive technology seeker for GSK, conducted a spot-on presentation on Corr's suggestion on moving R&D away from being focused on P&L. Shorter explained how the "seeker program" was created and piloted with zero ties to P&L and totally focused on the investigation of thinking differently. To make his point, he discussed how companies are striving to do more with less. According to Shorter, employees have a tremendous focus on daily deliverables, and as a result, if companies don't create a structure to allow for innovative thinking, this activity tends to get pushed aside. Quite a conundrum when you consider that failure to innovate often results in company failure.

Raymond Bain, Ph.D, VP head of quantitative sciences; and Jerald Schindler, VP late development statistics with Merck, explained the company's approach to using adaptive trial design. Simply by increasing the utilization of this technique from 25% of their studies to around 40% has resulted in saving over $200 million in just two years. Debbie Brooks, cofounder and executive vice chairman of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, explained how the organization is often thought of as being a patient advocacy organization, when in reality, it is focused on de-risking Parkinson's drug development. I was surprised to learn that the foundation has funded over $285 million in research, with 87 cents of every dollar donated going directly to R&D activities.

There were a variety of other interesting presentations involving executives including Allergan, Altheos, Amag, CSL Behring, Eli Lilly, Millenium, Novartis, Rhythm, and Vertex. Space precludes me from being able to discuss all of them. Perhaps you should see about being invited next year so you can get the inside scoop. To inquire about possibly being invited, email The Conference Forum's Valerie Bowling - vbowling@theconferenceforum.org. 

2nd Annual Executing Global Clinical Trials and DPharm, Disruptive Innovation to Advance Clinical Trials for Pharma, Biologics & Devices Slideshow

The 2nd Annual Executing Global Clinical Trials Conference was co located with our DPharm; Disruptive Innovations to Advance Clinical Trials for Pharma, Biologics & Devices in September 2011 in the Philadelphia Loews Hotel, PA.

2nd Annual Executing Global Clinical Trials 

This strategic level event is focused on how to execute global trials to produce higher quality data at less cost. Led by Purdue Pharma and BMS, key topics include Infrastructure, non-traditional markets, risk management, ethics/corporate responsibility and outsourcing. International regulations and where the clinical, commercial and therapeutic opportunities are outside the US is covered.


DATES ANNOUNCED! The 2012 event will be held on September 13th & 14th in the Fairmont Copley Square Hotel, Boston

Disruptive Innovations to Advance Clinical Trials for Pharma, Biologics & 

Devices

Led by Pfizer and Novartis, this groundbreaking conference delivers only case studies that demonstrate either a disruptive or an innovative approach to advancing clinical trials. Mobile Clinical Trials, Virtual Trials, Open Source Clinical Development are just a few examples of case studies featured.  This conference is designed to be engaging in a highly informative format, similar to the style of TED events. Each session will deliver a clear set of objectives, summary and key take-aways around:

1.Challenges and opportunities in clinical development/trials

2.Innovations in science applied to clinical development/trials

3.Innovations in technology applied to clinical development/trials

4.New business models for clinical development/trials

DATES ANNOUNCED! The 2012 event will be held on September 13th & 14th in the Fairmont Copley Square Hotel, Boston

New Paradigms to Fund and Move Drug Development 2012

Click here to view these pictures larger

The New Paradigms to Fund and Advance Drug Development was held in January 10-12, 2012.  Attended by all levels of Biotech CEOs, R&D leaders and the Investment community, the conference delivered information on alternative sources of funding, non-traditional partnering strategies and innovative approaches to drug approval for the successful commercialization of new therapies.

For more information on our Annual New Paradigms Conference, please visit here.

Partnership Opportunities in Drug Delivery 2011 slideshow

The Conference Forum presented PODD, Partnership Opportunities in Drug Delivery, in October 2011 in Boston, MA. PODD was designed with two purposes:

1. To present a strategic level event for pharma and biotech business development and external licensing professionals with a thorough overview of the latest drug delivery technologies available along with an update on deals and opportunities to enhance patients’ quality of life, improve therapies and extend the life cycle of a drug.

2. To provide drug delivery and specialty pharmas with a platform to present their technologies and get the latest insights from both established pharma and biotechs as well as start up companies on what the delivery and formulation needs are.

For more information on our upcoming 2012 PODD Conference please visit here.

DPharm 2011 Co Chair Blog

Our Co-Chair, Puneet Sapra, Director, World Wide Business Development & Innovation at Pfizer writes a blog about his thoughts from our September 2011 program:

Last year, I had the pleasure of working with a distinguished and experienced team to curate the DPharm conference in Philadelphia in September -- a TED-style event showcasing innovations and leading practitioners in Pharma R&D with a slight focus on clinical research. 

Life Science Leader Chief Editor, Robert Wright, punctually blogged about the event ("Yo Adrian! - The Disruptive Innovation Event Was A Knockout").  Although three months have passed since the conference, I'm finally getting around to highlighting three themes that surfaced from the 25 speakers that underscore the promise and challenge of innovation in Pharma R&D:

1. The Pharma industry is only just scratching the surface of transformative approaches to developing and testing new products.  Scientists, physicians, patients, technologists and strategists have enormous potential to re-design development and testing approaches as the industry shifts goals from population-based, blockbuster products to precision-based, personalized products.  This shift demands a lot of everyone.  For example, it requires re-thinking the role of the patient in clinical research. Requires novel applications of information technology and science.  It also demands new skills of leaders.  Greg Simon (Pfizer), John Orloff (Novartis), Parvis Ghahramani (Forest Labs) peeled back the complexities, thinking and actions required to make exciting strides using science, technology and business models.


2. We can better apply the full-spectrum of clinical research options and utilize insights thereof appropriately.  The first step is appreciating the full spectrum of options.  Clinical research is no more a monolithic practice of prospective double-blinded placebo randomized controlled trials.  Yes, RCTs are the "gold standard" for regulatory approval of new medicines.  But, "real world" studies serve an important role.  Retrospective and prospective analysis of the real-life experience of patients'  experience with therapies, care pathways, incentives can also provide important insights to transform health care.  Steve Labkoff (AstraZeneca) and Ben Heywood (PatientsLikeMe) provided relevant examples of the latter.


3. The role of innovator in clinical research is not for the faint of heart, and we need more.   This was perhaps the most valuable takeaway for many.  It's obvious to many that successfully launching a new initiative with external partners demanded seemingly super-human levels of insight, perseverance and courage.  It was much less obvious how much these qualities needed to be applied to move organizations internally as well.  Fortunately, with practice the skills of an innovator can be developed.  Designing a creative solution and finding a way to implement it - the essence of innovation - can be learned.  Miguel Orri (Pfizer), Jon Platt (?WhatIf!), Randy Spaulding (Spaulding Clinical) and others shared their experiences of how they got things done.

Over 150 people attended the event.  The feedback was encouraging, especially for an inaugural event.  One attendee's comment summed up the caliber of the crowd:

"This was the first conference where I felt I learned with people who can truly change the world."

I was honored to be a part of it.  As we look forward to the September 13-14, 2012 event in Boston, please feel free to reach out or send your comments to service@theconferenceforum.org with areas of interest you'd like to see part of for the 2012 event.