2020 7th SAPA-CT Annual Conference

Breakthrough Discoveries and Advanced Therapies to Patients

Author: Lei Chen, Yanchun Lin Photo: Web Editor: kai ying

November 14th, 2020

The 7th Annual Conference of the Sino-American Pharmaceutical Professionals Association – Connecticut was successfully held online on November 14th, 2020. The conference was conducted in a virtual format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which however made it possible to attract attendees from a broader range of institutions, states and countries. Pharmaceutical professionals and academic experts joined the conference and shared their knowledge and insights under the theme of this year: “Brining Breakthrough Discoveries and Advanced Therapies to Patients”. 

Dr. Yan Yan, the SATA-CT President, opened the conference with enthusiastic remarks. She outlined the current challenges and opportunities and emphasized the importance of innovation, communication and collaboration during the current pandemic. She then briefly introduced speakers and panelists.

Plenary Session I: Accelerating Market Access in Advanced Medicine

Mrs. Tina Patel, Vice President of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, gave the first keynote presentation titled “Market Access Strategies at Boehringer Ingelheim”. Mrs. Patel shared her own career trajectory into the field of market access and patient access, and talked about how her team maximizes the value of advanced medicine by matching drugs with patients who are in most need. She also talked about the challenge of balancing the profit pressure from the payors and the benefits of patients receiving new drugs, and how Boehringer Ingelheim, as a company valuing social responsibility, tackled those issues.  

The session continued with the presentation by Dr. Chunlin Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Medicilon. His presentation titled “Preclinical Strategies to Facilitate Market Access” compared the regulation criteria for IND-enabling studies required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and those required by National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) in China. He recommended his own company, as the service provider for drugs, aiming at entering both the U.S. and Chinese markets. 

The first session was concluded by the second keynote speaker Dr. Heping Zhang, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics, Professor in the Child Study Center and Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University. Dr. Zhang presented a newly developed statistical method for clinical studies, Depth Importance in Precision Medicine (DIPM). He explained this tree-and-forest-based model for right-censored survival outcomes with great mathematical depth and a vivid simile of a company hierarchical structure. He also illustrated how data science could boost the confidence of decision and demonstrated the accuracy of the method and how to apply it to a clinical dataset.

Plenary Session II: Breakthrough Innovation in Precision Medicine

The second session started off with Dr. Chia-Lin Wei’s presentation on “Whole Viruome Sequence Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)”. Dr. Wei is Professor and Director of Genome Technologies of the Jackson Laboratory. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus worldwide in March 2020, her team has dedicated to sequencing and analyzing the genome and transcriptome of the SARS-CoV2 virus. Dr. Wei showed how sequencing-based studies enable the tracing of virus evolution/transmission and its interaction with host immune system, and contribute to the classification of symptomatic vs. asymptomatic patient groups and inspire the discovery of potential therapeutic targets. 

Next, Dr. Siyuan (Steven Wang), Assistant Professor of Genetics and Cell Biology at Yale University, presented the topic of “Image-based Spatial Genomics and Multiomics”. As an expert of three-dimensional organization of chromatin (so called “3D genome” structure), he first addressed the long-lasting technical challenge of systematically measuring 3D genome structures with single-cell resolution, and then introduced several methods developed by his lab to address this challenge. He highlighted the power of the latest technique, Multiplexed Imaging of Nucleome Architectures (MINA), to resolve the spatial distribution of fetal liver cell types. 

Continuing on the theme of the breakthrough in single-cell technologies, Dr. Rong Fan, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, talked about “Bringing Single-cell Multiomics to Diagnosis and Therapy”. He reviewed the advancement of multiomics technologies and their application in precision medicine, including Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CART) T cell therapy. He finished the talk by introducing a powerful DBiT-seq (microfluidic Deterministic Barcoding in Tissue for spatial omics sequencing) platform developed by his lab that allows for high-spatial-resolution multiomics tissue mapping.  

Dr. Xiang Gao, Executive Director at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, concluded the session by his presentation titled “ Role of Pharmacometrics in Precision Medicine and its Application for Eculizumab Dose Recommendation”. He walked us through the significant role of pharmacometrics in drug development and regulatory decisions, and the common quantitative system pharmacology models in practice. Dr. Gao further illustrated the importance of pharmacometrics in precision medicine with Eculizumab dose recommendation as an example.

Plenary Session III (afternoon) : Noval Therapy

The afternoon session started off with a keynote talk from Dr. Usman“Oz” Azam, president and CEO of Tmunity Therapeutics Inc. In the talk entitled “Catalysts in cell therapies for the next decade”, he reviewed the history of cancer immunotherapy and pointed out the future direction of cell therapies. Dr. Azam emphasized that we come to the era that multiomics, artificial intelligence (AI)  and synthetic comparator trial data will push cell therapies forward. 

The next keynote speaker was Dr. Jim McNally, chief scientific officer of BioAgilytix. He introduced the trend of CAR-T therapy and gene therapy from technical perspectives and emphasized the role of bioanalysis in the development of cell therapy and gene therapy. He proposed that, alongside the increased complexity of therapeutic modalities, the measurement techniques need to be improved to provide meaningful quantitative and qualitative information.  

Panel Disscuation Session I (afternoon) : business opportunities

The conference proceeded with the first panel discussion on business opportunities by Dr. Mostafa Analoui (Executive Director, UConn Venture Development and Technology Incubation Program, UConn Health), Sri Muthu (CEO & Managing Founder, Health Venture) and Dr. Larry Gao (Chairman of the Board at Rainbow Global Capital Group LLC). They discussed about the importance of global collaboration and on-going incubating programs. The goal of one of these programs is to bring developing global companies to Connecticut at their early stage.

Panel Disscuation Session II (afternoon) : career and training opportunities

The second-panel discussion focused on career and training opportunities. We have Yu-Hui Rogers (Senior Director, Research Strategy, Asia at the Jackson Lab), Dr. Zhe-Sheng Chen (Professor of St. John’s University) and Dr. John Sun (Global Program Lead, Novartis) as our panelists. They shared their insights into the different types of career paths for trainees, such as academia, industry, and investment bank. They also emphasized importance of the personal interest and strength. “You can reach your potential only when you are in the right position”.

Panel Disscuation Session III (afternoon) : Immigration Law

Amy Feng, the founding partner of Jing Feng Law Group PLLC, delivered a special session on Immigration Workshop . She gave an overview of visa policy changes in 2020 and discussed the possible outcome of these changes. She finished her talk by sharing information about applying for an O-1 visa.

Annual Award

Dr. Yan Yan announced the corporate service award and SAPA-CT Volunteer Service Award

Closing Remark

At the end of the conference, Dr. Xiaoyong Yang, the President of 2020-2021 SAPA-CT gave closing remarks by expressing gratitude to all the speakers, SAPA-HQ and SAPA-CT leadership teams, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees.