It’s that time of year again: here at the ICR office, we are making the final preparations for our Annual Conference, which is just a few weeks away on April 19th and 20th. The conference is ICR’s flagship event, and a high point of the year for clinical research professionals. Delegates, speakers and exhibitors come to learn about and discuss the issues facing professionals in their work designing, managing and conducting clinical trials.
The past couple of years have been challenging for us all, in terms of time and budget to invest in our professional development and networking. We’ve listened to your feedback about previous ICR conferences, and have built on the changes we introduced last year to give you the best event possible, with a programme of relevant and informative sessions for all the diverse roles making up the ICR membership. The 2010 ICR conference makes it easier for you to reconnect with your profession, and create new opportunities for yourself and your company.
After several years in the centre of England, we are bringing the conference to London for the first time in its history. This recognises the fact that more than half our members live within a couple of hours of the city. The Hilton Metropole, a few minutes away from Paddington station, is within easy reach of national and international transport services, whether you’re coming by car, train or plane.
For the first time in nearly a decade, the conference will be held in the hotel where most of the delegates, speakers etc. are also staying. This meant that we were able to offer delegates who booked their places early preferential rates on their hotel reservations. You also have the benefit of being able to carry on discussing issues after the conference formally closes, at our networking drinks reception on the Monday evening, in the bar or over dinner, or even over a shared breakfast before the second day of the conference opens.
Another important change is that we’ve frozen delegate prices to remain at their 2009 levels, to help members in these challenging economic times. This makes the ICR conference even better value for money than other multi-stream conferences.
If you can only go to one conference…
This year, we have a varied selection of relevant, knowledgeable and experienced speakers to discuss the important issues facing us all. All of the topics to be discussed at this year’s conference will impact on the way you work now and in the future, either directly on indirectly. Whatever your role in clinical development, and whatever point you’re at in your career, it’s vital that you stay up-to-date with the latest developments and make your voice heard in the discussions about their implementation, impact and implications.
The overarching theme of the conference is that clinical research is influenced by both internal and external factors, with economics and politics often having as great an impact on the way we work to develop new treatments as developments in medical science and operating procedures. The interfaces between these areas will provide the clinical research community with its greatest challenges, and its greatest opportunities, over the coming years.
Plenary sessions: Personalised healthcare & Health economics
Plenary sessions on key topics will close each day’s proceedings.
In the first of these, speakers from AstraZeneca and Roche will look at personalised healthcare, certainly an indicator for the way many future medicines will be developed and studied. The technological, scientific and clinical advancements in pharmaceuticals R&D over the past decade has ensured that the concept of personalised healthcare is now rapidly becoming the practice of personalised healthcare, particularly in infectious disease and oncology. This important field has implications reaching into patient recruitment and informed consent, pricing and economics, biomarkers and companion diagnostics etc.
The second plenary session will close the conference with a detailed look at the economic evaluation of healthcare technologies, which is increasingly used to inform social choices about access to innovative treatments. This is a field where the UK leads much of global thinking. Professors Richard Lilford and Karl Claxton, both of whom are close to the development of these ideas and their practical application, will discuss which health technologies should be approved or covered for use, what price ought to be paid for such technologies and how much and what type of evidence is required to support coverage or approval. The changing health-economic landscape will have an increasing impact on which clinical development programmes take priority, how individual clinical trials are structured, and how additional kinds of information need to be collected and analysed.
Parallel sessions: From patient recruitment to research governance
There are too many exciting topics being covered in the 12 parallel sessions to discuss them all in detail, but here is a selection of sessions that are proving popular with early-registering delegates:
Dr Clare Morgan of the NIHR Clinical Research Network Coordinating Centre will review what the NIHR CRN is doing to improve reliability, including improving confidence around quality study feasibility assessment, access to a wider pool of committed investigators with dedicated, trained resource to support study delivery and proactive study performance management.
Gaynor Anders and Prof. Theo Raynor urge us to “think outside the box” about patient recruitment. Real progress is being made on several fronts of the challenge to meet the study participation needs of research programs. However, there is still a huge gap between those needs and the collective willingness and ability of patients to enrol in studies.
Mark Lewis MICR and Christine McGrath MICR will explore the challenges and tactics involved in applying policy-level initiatives in practice at individual Trusts, to enhance and streamline UK clinical research. They will also discuss how to improve the performance of individual R&D departments (in terms of quality, speed, added value etc.).
Another key update will come from Janet Wisely of NRES, who will discuss the latest developments in ethics review. She will look at the ongoing development of the IRAS application system, the 2009 pilot scheme in proportionate review, and the use of ethics advisers to help committees work more effectively by ensuring that proposals are well presented, with scientific referees’ reports if necessary.
Other sessions consider practical issues, such as the role of research nurses in the informed consent process, the changing clinical data requirements for medical devices, managing remote teams and the move towards risk-based inspections.
Full abstracts and speaker profiles for all conference sessions are available at www.icr-global.org/community/conferences/31st-annual-conference-exhibition.
Annual General Meeting: May 19th
The ICR Annual General Meeting has traditionally been an important part of the Annual Conference. However, as announced last month and clarified elsewhere in this issue, we have decided that this year’s AGM deserves more time and attention than it can easily be given alongside the conference. Instead, the AGM will be held at the ICR office in Bourne End, on May 19th, starting at 5pm. Further details will be published to members in due course.
More targeted exhibition
In addition to attending conference sessions and networking with your peers throughout the industry, many delegates also come to the conference to find out more about potential new suppliers, and the exhibition has always been an important addition to the ICR conference. This year’s exhibition is already sold out, and we are pleased to have the support of so many companies from throughout the clinical research sector.
However, after listening to your feedback over previous years about the balance of exhibiting companies and the sometimes overly intrusive attitudes of a few individual stand personnel, we have decided to reduce the size of the overall exhibition, and particularly the proportion of recruitment agencies that have been invited to exhibit. Along with our Exhibitors’ Code of Conduct, this means that you will be able to walk through the exhibition aisles without concerns, and decide without pressure which companies you’d like to talk to.
Make the most of your membership
As I write this piece, in March, many of you have already registered to attend the conference, and it is becoming obvious that several of the sessions will be well attended. If you are struggling to find the time (or the budget) to come to the full meeting, we are offering single-day conference passes at reduced rates.
As we hope you’ll agree, this year’s Annual Conference will have something for everyone: plenty to learn, plenty of business benefit, but also plenty for us all to enjoy. We are also offering special reduced rates for professionals working in academia or the public sector, and to full-time students. To reserve your place, simply fax back the form on the back of the conference flyer enclosed with this issue of CRfocus, or register online via the ICR website (www.icr-global.org/community).
