Introducing Tales from the Road, a series of blog shorts, where our Premier People report in from their travels outside the office. Because sometimes, not everything that happens on the road stays on the road!
Today’s inaugural post comes from Juliet Moritz, Executive Director, Strategic Development Department, Rare Diseases, reporting back on her trip to Amsterdam last month.
I had the opportunity to attend the Orphan Drugs Summit in Amsterdam at the end of last month. The meeting included a cross-section of people and organizations devoted to developing therapies for patients with rare diseases. It was a diverse group of people and so the topics of the presentations were broad as well.
There were presentations on how patient advocacy organizations were taking a larger role in the development of therapies for patients with rare diseases which were, of course, fascinating to me as I really feel this will be an area of significant change in the near future. A few pharmaceutical companies presented their experiences developing drugs for rare disease patients. There were a couple of presentations from payers who presented their perspectives as well.
Highlights of the meeting included the opportunity to meet people who are committed to improving the lives of patients with rare diseases including a number of patient advocates, especially our Twitter friend, Alan Thomas of Ataxia and Me.