Dear AAPS members–
The days are growing longer and warmer, which means spring-and biotechnology-is in the air! As we build our Four Seasons of Science at AAPS, spring brings exciting biologics and biotechnology topics-including the return of the reimagined National Biotechnology Conference (NBC). Registration is now open! This is going to be a great program. Just this week we were able to secure Professor Andrew Lo of MIT for the closing plenary: yes, a finance expert and a true innovator in the area of financing biomedical innovation who has also thought deeply about the impacts of the current global public health crisis on our economy and society as a whole. To me, his thoughts will be the perfect capstone to several days of programming that centers on the latest innovations in nucleic acid, antibody, and cell therapies-putting our scientific work into the greater perspective of public health impact on society. If you'd like a quick tour of NBC highlights to whet your appetite, look no further than the AAPS Newsmagazine's coverage in the March issue!
Our biologic focus continues into the summer. If you are part of the passionate, boisterous bioanalytical crowd at AAPS, I am sure you already have the 22nd Annual Land O'Lakes Bioanalytical Conference on your calendar for July: @Chad Briscoe and his scientific programming committee are working on an extremely compelling-and inspiring-program. Their theme is how the bioanalytical community rose to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic: Stronger in the Future - What we Learned and How we are Applying the Experiences of the COVID Years to be Better Bioanalytical Scientists. Analytical advances played a critical role all along the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical development chain to bring live-saving medicines to patients in unprecedented short time frames. We are taking a deep dive into one area of potentially permanent innovations that the pandemic has brought about. I am particularly interested in the regulatory discussion that will happen at the end of the meeting-rapid pharmaceutical development around the globe has also significantly increased the pressures on regulators to keep up with new technologies and assay solutions, and also to understand and evaluate comparability and equivalence.
Having spent so much of my career in the area of assay standardization and harmonization, I also wonder if or how this accelerated development ripples down to standardized tests and assays at a swifter pace than normal, something that could enable our global community of scientists to further prepare for future public health challenges. I was thinking about that in particular while I was reading in AAPS Newsmagazine that the U.S.'s push to identify COVID variants is still too disconnected and fractured. Clearly there is more work to do!
As we build out the Four Seasons of Science, I hope you will help by bringing your thoughts, ideas, and issues forward as session topics, workshop and webinar proposals, and in your willingness to volunteer. Through the efforts and insights of members, we are able to schedule events like the upcoming workshop Vaccine Stability Considerations to Enable Rapid Development and Deployment. If you have ideas for new programming, you can send us a proposal anytime!
As always, I hope that our efforts to bring you together to share your science can provide at least a little piece to the puzzle science faces in solving these issues. I hope I have also convinced you that once again this month's AAPS Newsmagazine is full of good stuff, so if you have some extra time between all the live events we are offering, I encourage you to take a look. Of course I also hope you will continue to let our science inspire you to look up and ahead.
Tina
Share your thoughts with Tina via the AAPS Community!