44th Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association
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MEETING REPORT
© 2008 Adis Data Information BV. All rights reserved.
44th Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association 22–26 June 2008; Boston, Massachusetts, USA Sue Pochon Wolters Kluwer Health | Adis, Auckland, New Zealand
The 44th Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association (DIA) was held in Boston, MA, USA in June 2008. The event was attended by more than 8000 professionals from around the globe and over 500 exhibiting companies. The 4-day meeting comprised over 360 sessions, with topics as diverse as adaptive clinical trial designs and adaptive methods, approval pathways for products to treat rare diseases, biotechnology, clinical and regulatory considerations for personalized medicines, combination device and therapeutic products, the Critical Path Initiative, multinational clinical trials, patient recruitment and retention, and paediatrics. The focus of the 44th DIA meeting was global drug development and included over 100 sessions dedicated to issues affecting key regions. There were 27 sessions devoted to Western Europe, 23 to Japan, 18 to China, 12 to India and 11 to Latin America. There were also several sessions focusing on Taiwan, Canada and Eastern Europe. This report details a select few of the many sessions available during the DIA meeting. 1. Keynote Address If a single take home message could be drawn from this year’s keynote session it was the importance of collaboration. Dr Dennis Ausiello, Chief of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard University Medical School, started the proceedings by outlining the blended roles for academia and industry in the goal of bringing innovative new drugs to market. He asserted that the basic science of understanding disease has traditionally been the goal of academic institutions but that the modern viewpoint is that curing disease is a business. There are several factors that have contributed to a lack of collaboration in the past. Not least the fact that “not all good science is good business”. In addition, any relationship between
academia and industry is vulnerable to attack, as critics often paint collaboration between these parties in a negative light. There is also a lack of appreciation of the importance of the role of academia in drug development, particularly in enabling key discoveries through basic science. It is common knowledge that the field of drug development has changed dramatically in the last 20 years and will need to change further to succeed in the modern climate. A case in point is the complexity of disease pathways. In the 1980s, researchers may have been faced with hundreds of potential drug targets. Twenty years later, that figure has risen to tens of thousands of targets. No single company or academic institution can address so many targets, even when concentrating their efforts on a single disease. In 1980, the global cost of research and development (R&D) was approximately $US2 billion; in 2008, those costs have risen to $US40 billion. These days it is necess
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