The R / Pharma conference began as grass-roots initiative led by data scientists working in the pharmaceutical industry to promote the use of R in Pharma, and to establish and share best practices. The founding members organized the project as an R Consortium working group, and undertook the ambitious task of launching an annual conference envisioned as a relatively small, collegial, industry-oriented event with a strong scientific program.

Inaugural Conference

The inaugural conference, R / Pharma 2018 (https://bit.ly/2RVKKI8) held on August 16th and 17th at Harvard University attracted a representatives from academia, government, and industry.

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Figure 1: R / Pharma 2018 participants

Keynotes (https://bit.ly/2SdvMNd) were presented by Lilliam Rosario of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Michael Lawrence Genentech/Roche and the R Core Group, and Max Kuhn and Joe Cheng from RStudio.

Over forty-five talks and workshops were delivered with topics ranging from reproducible research, regulatory constraints and considerations, and package administration to scaling R for production. A considerable number of talks emphasized the development of production-grade Shiny applications. Although considerably larger than most of the Shiny applications developed, Roche’s 500,000 line application, which was presented at the conference and subsequently written up in a post (https://bit.ly/2NeXKFJ), reflects a common use case. Abstracts for the talks are available (https://bit.ly/2CUTEeG).

Organizing Committee

Melvin Munsaka - AbbVie; Bella Fang and Min Lee - Amgen; Eric Nantz - Eli Lilly; Elena Rantou and Paul Schuette - FDA; Elizabeth Hess - Harvard; James Black, Reinhold Koch, and Michael Lawrence - Genentech / Roche; Edward Louzier - Merck; Michael Blanks - PPD; Phil Bowsher - RStudio; and Harvey Lieberman - Sanofi.

Program Committee

Co-chairs for the program committee were Bella Feng - Amgen, John Sims - Pfizer, and Ryan Benz - SocalBioinformatics.

Program committee leads included: Melvin Munsaka - AbbVie; Robert Engle - Biogen; Elena Rantou and Paul Schuette - FDA; Elizabeth Hess - Harvard University; James Black and Reinhold Koch - Genentech/Roche; Paulo Bargo - Johnson & Johnson; Eric Nantz - Eli Lilly; Edward Lauzier - Merck; Xiao Ni- Novartis; Thomas Tensfeldt - Pfizer; and Harvey Lieberman - Sanofi.

R / Pharma 2019

R / Pharma 2019 will be held on August 21, 22, and 23, 2019 at Harvard University. In a response to attendee feedback, a third day is being planned for workshops. Please watch the conference website for more information as it becomes available.

R / Pharma 2019 conference website: http://rinpharma.com/

Twitter: #rinpharma