April 19, 2023
The April FOCM | GLSA Networking event started out with welcoming everyone and introducing our presenter Joseph Cheng – of PiVOT. Joseph caught everyone’s attention with a trivia questionnaire featuring a variety of famous and not so famous Philippine individuals. A sampling of them were: Manny Pacquiao, Lea Salonga, Erik Spoelstra, R’Bonney Gabriel, Dave Bautista and Nicole Scherzinger. This was followed up with facts about the Philippines, such as: English is the official language, cars are driven on the same side as in the US, 4 % of registered nurses in the US are Filipinos, non-communicable disease causes of mortality break out as: 38% cardiovascular, 18% cerebrovascular, 16% cancer and 12% diabetes. The population of the Philippines is 113 million people, with 1.5 million new births annually with an average population age of 25.
A concerted effort was put into the clinical trial landscape such that the Food and Drug Administration of the Philippines approves studies and product imports in 60 days with ethics approvals coming in 45 – 90 days. PiVOT is the leading and largest Philippine CRO with over 100 employees and have recruited over 40,000 patients into clinical trials across Cardiology, Pediatric Vaccines, COVID-19 trials (vaccines and interventions). Rheumatology, Gastroenterology and Pulmonology (Tuberculosis).
Joseph’s presentation was followed by Q and A, after which we broke into breakout sessions for small group networking. These have been well received, allowing individuals to meet with others, learn about and from each other and identify ways in which they can be helpful to each other.
Meeting guidelines:
- Think of this as an open house event – drop in when you can and leave when you need to;
- When we have a presenter we have them start when we have assembled a strong amount of respondents – usually 10-15 minutes after the start.
- Presenters’ topics are not sales pitches – the focus is on an aspect of clinical trials; where in the process their services are used and aspects of that step.
- The link to get the GLSA newsletter and notifications about future live and virtual events: http://bit.ly/3UTb8hL
- We ask everyone to put their LinkedIn link into the chat to facilitate connecting and future follow up.
Attendees:
Joseph Cheng; PiVOT and the evening presenter
Stacey Richardson; FHI Clinical
Amy Lee, PharmD; Kaiser Permanente
Mike O’Gorman; Life Science Marketplace
Peter Payne, Consultant
Gabrielle DeBoer, Consultant
Michael Young, biomedwoRx
Andrew Mulchinski, Symbio Research
Rodmar Pulido, PiVOT
Susan Jalbert, Oracle
Amanda Pexa Weber, Merit CRO
Mike Minor, IMA Clinical Research
Carlos Martinez, America’s Health Foundation
Cherey Bigay, PiVOT
Ella Mae Ortegha, PiVOT
Kim Lupo, Portrett Pharmaceuticals
Mark Borndahl, Zymewire
Loretta Cipkus-Dubray, Global Clinical Connections
Arati Bhosale, Sieve Health
GLSA Attendees:
Joe Buser
Chris Matheus
Denise McNerney
Hannah Lloyd
Timmina Williams
Charity Dube
Jordan Brown
Sally Haller
Ori Geshury
Liz Mirra
A couple snapshots from the event are below:
