ACT: What are your goals or objectives for DIA for the remainder of the year?
Pierce: There are so many things that we’re looking to do and a piece of that is DIA is a global organization, and what makes us most effective is being able to have that global voice. We’re really looking at expansion into countries that we haven’t had as much presence in. We’ve had a very concerted effort in the Middle East and Africa, including bringing board members who focus on the Africa market onto our board. We’ve also hired a general manager in the Middle East based in Egypt to be tapping into that market and really trying to work with the regulators, the academics, a number of folks, the biotech companies in that region to create a more global view. Additionally, we’ve really been spending a lot of time working with our partners in Korea and Japan, and again, just markets that it’s very important to continue to represent the entire world and make sure those voices are pulled into what we’re doing.
The other thing that we’re going to be spending a lot of time on are some of our research projects. We have a handful of research projects in the works, one looking at patient tolerability, back to the topic we spoke about earlier, but including that voice in the development of oncology treatments. So, how do we capture that definition and incorporate that in an objective way into clinical trials? That’s a research study that we’re working on in.
In conjunction with some academic partners, we also have some consortium work that’s going on right now looking at the reimbursement model for participants in clinical trials, which ties back to the DE&I question as well. We want to make sure that clinical trials are available for everybody to participate, not just the wealthy, that financial barriers are not the reason that people can’t participate in clinical trials, and that’s a big part of really tapping into, again, making sure that you get people in the trial that are going to be the intended user of those products. We’ll be pulling through some landscape analyses, looking at the industry and what they’re doing on that topic, and different pharma companies and biotech companies—what their policies are and what’s really in their mind as they’re thinking about shaping the future of their policies to address those topics. I think that those are two of the areas, again, just looking at the global perspective growth, making sure that we can continue to evolve.
The last thing I’ll say is making sure that we’re really on the forefront of cell and gene therapy and the incorporation of some of the new AI tools, and really revamping some of our content to be more relevant for the topics that are happening right now, and making sure that we’re really staying at the forefront of that, and that we’re working closely with the regulators and also with the tech companies to understand what’s happening and make sure that that’s being included in the work and the workshops that we’re preparing for the future.