Category Archives: Conversations

Communication, Conversations, Featured, Leadership, Patient Centric, Pediatric

Clinical Research in Very Sick Children

Plenary Speaker – 23rd Annual Symposium on Clinical & Pharmaceutical Solutions through Analysis (CPSA USA 2020)

Athena Zuppa, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

“You know by blood volume alone… you can’t approach certain studies.” – Athena Zuppa, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Athena presents a passionate plenary talk, discussing may of the aspects related to caring for extremely sick children.  Clinical Coordinators and Assistants are faced with real world challenges, Everyday – with each day being different.  Each day, they have to bring their A-game, working in community and unison, applying true empathy and altruism while interacting with the children and their parents.  Of the many complexities discussed, they need to balance decisions based on the clinical and research community – often being faced with several treatment options and what is best for a particular situation.  As well, Athena and her teams are on the frontline for discussions with the parents about their sick child – diagnosis, consent, and progress – a challenging balance of information that needs to be delivered with care.  A dance Everyday, that is not scripted, balancing prioritizations, while making real time decisions, and speaking to the parents of very sick children.

Bioinformatics, Conversations, Featured, Integrated Healthcare, Patient Centric, Standardization

Breaking Barriers to Biomedical Data for Efficacious Drugs, Faster

CPSA Everyday Conversation

Abhishek Jha, Elucidata

“Plant (data) in rows if you are going to harvest.” – Abhishek Jha, Elucidata

Abhishek Jha describes the urgency and challenges with curating data to improve decisions in patient care.  Towards the dream of collecting data, integrating data, and generating usable information – the path starts with how the data is collected and stored at the beginning.  Working backwards from the patient, different data repositories are often not structured, making data mining challenging.  Often data cannot be used because of the lack of structure in public and proprietary repositories.  Abhishek’s dream to structure data with better quality control – and standardize – will help streamline bioinformatics performance, allowing experts to make better decisions, and improve patient care.

Conversations, Featured, Leadership, People Development, Relationships, Teamwork

What Is Important About a CPSA Event?

CPSA Everyday Conversation

Ismael Zamora, Molecular Discovery

“The presentation is not as important as the conversation.” – Ismael Zamora, Molecular Discovery

Ismael Zamora’s Everyday is an enlightening discussion on the changes in the life sciences industry during the pandemic, especially while many of us learn to balance life while working from home.  Balancing not only life, but the relationships we have in the workplace.  Isma has a team of computer scientist that can now code from home, producing more code than they ever have.  However, although productivity went up, he found that some of the normal conversations that we have in the office were missing – to where it created competitions that did not exist previously, as well as other seemingly small nuances that turned out to be bigger than originally thought.  With the observation of these changes, he asked his team to plan coffee meetings where they just talk – and not necessarily just about work.  It is really important to stay connected, even as we all work from home.  Isma finds this conversation parallel to the CPSA events.  A place where people can feel like they can just talk, to get to know each other, and to work together to solve complex challenges.