The all-new Clinical Collaboration Congress will take place September 25-27 at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, MA.
In essence, Clinical Collaboration Congress is an interactive and collaborative event for clinical leaders interested in changing how the clinical trial industry does business.
The CCC organizers are offering Rebar Interactive blog readers who attend the event a 20% discount. To claim the discount, go to the registration page and use the code XP1825REBAR during the checkout process.
Though CCC is the first event of its kind, you are likely familiar with the event organizers. CCC is being organized by IIR, which is the same company behind Partnerships in Clinical Trials. My blog post about the 22nd annual Partnerships is available here.
A Clinical Collaboration Congress Overview
The pharmaceutical industry is moving to increasingly collaborative models of drug development. Given this shift, the focus of CCC is no doubt timely. For clinical trial professionals seeking to successfully navigate this new territory, CCC offers a nice forum.
In terms of CCC format, the first few hours of the morning are devoted to keynotes focusing on collaboration. After morning keynotes, attendees break off into “think tank sessions” focusing on three tracks:
- Partnering with Central Labs
- Partnering Strategies for Small & Mid-size Pharma & Biotech
- Collaboration for Clinical Process Improvement
These think tank sessions allow attendees to:
- Learn through case studies and panels
- Engage with speakers and audience members through roundtable discussions
- Partner with peers based on your services and needs (facilitated by IIR and determined before the event)
In addition to the keynotes and think tank sessions, CCC provides other interesting opportunities.
- Two pre-conference summits, the Medical Device Trials Task Force and the Vendor Quality Oversight Workshop for Small to Mid-Sized Pharma and Biotech
- An invitation only Innovation Incubator, an exchange forum of senior executives as well as select service providers
- Tech Town Hall, where innovative companies will showcase their technologies in a quick-fire setting with audience Q&A following each presentation
My Session Highlights
To give you a more in-depth sense of the content, I’ll describe a couple of sessions that I find particularly interesting.
But please keep in mind that this selection is biased to topics that personally interest me. You should definitely check out the full agenda for a broader sense of what’s available.
Tap into Opportunities of Precision Medicine through Collaboration: Overcoming Challenges in Diagnostic and Co-Development
If you attended the 2013 Partnerships, you may remember Dr. Eric Topol’s excellent speech. The biggest theme of Topol’s speech was the democratization of medicine. Another important theme, which is strongly intertwined with this democratization, was a movement to personalized medicine.
Though the pharma industry largely recognizes that the blockbuster drug development model is quickly fading in effectiveness, few significant changes to this model have emerged. To embrace personalized medicine, new business models and creative partnerships must occur.
Regardless of your role in clinical trials, I think the personalized medicine trend will ultimately impact that role in one way or another. So I think this keynote should be of interest to just about everyone.
Leveraging the Voice of the Patient: Collaborate with Patient Organizations in Orphan Drug Development
Patient centricity has become a bit of a hot topic. But many of the examples of patient centricity that I’ve come across are fairly superficial. They also tend to revolve around technology.
Though technology can help to facilitate patient centricity, ultimately patient centricity requires something more difficult than deploying the latest technology. It requires a shift in perspective. Critical to this new perspective, in my opinion, are:
- Listening
- Empathy
- Giving up control
So when I read the description of this session, I got pretty excited. Andrew Jablonski, who is CEO of the Short Bowel Foundation, will speak about his organization’s partnership with NPS Pharmaceuticals. The Short Bowel Foundation and NPS partnered to win over the tiny pool of patients — fewer than 5,000 nationwide — that NPS’s drug is intended to treat.
In this case study session, attendees will hear about:
- How this partnership was arranged
- Challenges and lessons learned
- Execution of new initiatives (such as a the launch of a Patient Mentorship Program for educating and connecting Short Bowel Syndrome patients)
If the content described in this blog post sounds like a good match for your interests, head over to the Clinical Collaboration Congress website. And remember to use the code XP1825REBAR for a 20% discount on registration.
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