ACT: What were your greatest takeaways from this year’s DIA Global Annual Meeting in San Diego?
Pierce: This was my second DIA Global Annual Meeting. I think what continued to impress me was just the breadth of experience in the room, and the fact that we have over 300 regulators from around the world at the most senior levels was just amazing. You can have conversations with the chairman and the head of the FDA and the head of EMA walking down the hall—you don’t really get that kind of access anywhere else.
I think the other thing that I really loved this year is there were a ton of patient advocacy representatives—a lot of patient scholarships that were given out to bring more patients to the meeting. Then, I think the number one high note of this entire meeting for me, and I think everyone who attended was one of our patient speakers, Tom and Emily Whitehead. It was incredible. It was certainly a connection to why people do what they do when they go to work in this industry, and the meaning of these lifesaving cures that everyone talks about. It’s really easy, I think, to get stuck in the day to day of what they’re doing in their job, but when you see the end product, and you see a live person on the stage telling you that you saved their life and they’ve been able to now graduate college because of something that people in that room did. People were crying; multiple standing ovations, but it was just such a compelling story, and really just connected the audience with the lifesaving work that they’re doing.