Enthused by PHUSE (Part 2)

Day 2 kicked off with another keynote broadly themed along the lines of inclusiveness.? This time from Welsh international rugby player Gareth Thomas for an emotional and raw account of his life, struggles and challenges related to being able to come out as gay in the macho world of professional sport.? Gareth spoke from the heart and without slides and it was clear that his recount of his story touched the nerves of many audience members!

I missed the Digital Data Flow stream, but speaking to many delegates, this seemed to be another highlight for them, with lots of people thinking that this ‘just makes sense’ and ‘should save a lot of time and effort’.

Chris Decker gave an interesting presentation to try to unpack the differences between a data lake and a CDR and when one might be helpful over the other - Presentation link

Eleanor Sparling from 荷商葛蘭素史克藥廠 posed the question in her talk on SCE adoption – ‘Do you fit the tool to the process or the process to the tool’? and gave her perspective that you can’t take on a new tool and not also re-look at process, in fact it’s a perfect opportunity to re-look at process and update them to bring them in line with what is needed ‘today’! - Presentation link

Aksel Thomsen from Ferring Pharmaceuticals gave a nice account of how Ferring have enabled their developers to build smaller, containerized applications in their favorite language, be that R, Python or anything else and have integrated this with their CDR - Presentation link

Marianne Carames from Novo Nordisk walked through the why, what, and how of their journey in terms of modernizing their statistical computing environment.? It was really interesting to see the weighting on how they scored different solutions, with the greatest emphasis being placed on automation capabilities - Presentation link

My fantastic colleague and friend Achilles Zaras from eClinical Solutions provided some tangible and realistic applications for the use of AI/ML in helping automate clinical data review processes.? He backed up the theory by showing live examples in a live demo environment of the elluminate data cloud which piqued the interest of many audience members.? His perspective included the importance of having a human in the loop still and his presentation engaged the audience in many ways, including some good old fashioned ‘put your hands up’ type audience polls. (Top Secret – it was also Achilleas 40th birthday whilst he was at PHUSE but he didn’t tell anyone until after we had left!)? Happy Birthday Achilleas! - Presentation link

After the poster sessions, the eClinical Solutions team hosted a dinner for colleagues, customers, partners and friends at the Marco Pierre White steakhouse which had excellent views across the city and I would like to thank all those who joined us for the dinner.? Talk of karaoke to finish the night sent me swiftly back to my hotel room but I understand that Michael Whitworth had the Karaoke bar on its feet with his efforts behind the microphone ??

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The final day keynote kicked off with a commanding presentation from Cathy O'Dowd , the famous climber and explorer who was the first women to climb Mount Everest from both the North and the South sides.? Definitely not someone who pulls any punches, describing Everest today as somewhere where middle aged executives go to scratch their mid-life crisis itch.? Rather than focus on her Everest expeditions, Cathy chose to speak about the trials and tribulations that her and the team she was with had when they attempted to climb the Mazeno Ridge of Nanga Parbat.? Her story telling approach came with a twist though, as she chose to pose the audience with questions on what choices they would make if they were in her shoes before telling us what she actually did = keeping the audience totally engaged for the whole 1.5 hours.

Paul Fioole and Erik Lemmens from The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson gave us a nice insight into their ‘best of breed’ approach DATA4YOU initiative, sharing how Janssen had built a data review environment for cross functional data review - Presentation link

The final talk for me of the conference was from Stijn Rogiers from argenx who shared with us some of the entrepreneurial spirit of the fast moving and exciting biotech company, argenx and how for them, investing in commercial off the shelf software solutions that enable them to visualize and explore their clinical trial data, was something very important to them.? Stijn discussed solutions for Metadata management, ingesting and transforming data and then their latest project that included the use of the elluminate data cloud from eClinical Solutions to facilitate effective oversight and communication on clinical data - Presentation link

There were many other sessions I didn’t get to attend and it really was often a tough choice to choose which session to go to as the relevance of PHUSE to the vision of eClinical Solutions and the problems that our platform elluminate help solve are very closely aligned, particularly since we launched the SCE component of the elluminate data cloud in 2022.

We look forward to continuing to support and sponsor PHUSE in 2024 and still have some single day events to sponsor and attend in 2023.

Thanks to all the organizers, committees, venue staff, speakers and fellow delegates for making this a top event in 2023.

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