Dear Colleague,
Monday at PDA Week 2025 ended on a high with an evening filled with music, meetups, energetic conversations and fabulous desert weather. We hope you connected with peers new and old.
Before we dive into the eventful first day recap, we wanted to share a brief but important update about the annual PDA Industry and Honor Award Ceremony held on Sunday evening. The guests gathered for heartfelt tributes to PDA members whose volunteer work helps to lead PDA and the industry forward.
PDA CEO Glenn Wright gave a shoutout to the PDA superstars in his opening remarks yesterday, noting that $10,000 was raised for the Jette Christensen Early Career Professional Grant Sunday evening to support members who are in the early stages of their professional careers and journeys with PDA.
Want to contribute and help PDA raise even more to help our ECPs?
Visit the PDA Foundation website and donate>
Fresh Starts
Yesterday morning, a series of roundtable discussions set the pace for open dialogue and explorations of the innovations and issues facing pharma professionals. The roundtables are an exceptional opportunity to meet with like-minded professionals who are open, honest and supportive.
That was certainly the case with the roundtable on next gens, Developing the Next Generation of Pharmaceutical Professionals. In a wide-ranging conversation, it was clear that mentoring is a valuable opportunity for everyone involved. The roundtable itself became a mentoring experience with veteran professionals sharing their own war stories of forging their careers.
A few takeaways?
Technical skills can be taught, soft skills are innate. An Achilles Heel is impatience; for mentors taking the time to bring along younger colleagues and for early careerists, patience is required to put in the time and effort to excel. Trust why you are being trusted to take on new projects. And leadership is critical in every position; it’s not just relevant to the C-suite.
A completely different approach was taken in the Effective AI Deployment in Drug Manufacturing roundtable. In a scenario planning strategy, three different breakout groups were assigned roles (Quality Control Manager, Production, Engineering and IT, and Regulatory/Compliance) with the same case study. Each group was tasked to create a SWOT diagram (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).
After a dynamic exchange, one conclusion was that the implementation of AI requires additional roles to be involved including cybersecurity and training. The exercise raised questions about whether AI provides more opportunities or challenges in process validation, and what is validation in an AI space. The discussion was a good dialogue among the attendees and discussion leaders, who suggested a more in-depth workshop would be of value.
Another roundtable took on a different high-level challenge: Strategies for Modern Knowledge Management Implementation. Management of product and product knowledge plays a critical role across the product lifecycle and the group discussed avenues to implement knowledge management (KM) and the direction the industry needs to take to fully recognize its importance. Key point: the difference between explicit knowledge vs. tacit knowledge. And a takeaway: KM is not one step, it is a systemic build of data, information, knowledge and understanding.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to create KM that manages both the what and the why. It needs clear, simple, active, language. KM must come from the top down; senior leaders need to buy in. KM in shorthand is the why and why not, a breakdown in silo thinking and organization, and lead with the baton, i.e., pass along the knowledge.
Managing Disruption and Change
Our community gathered together at the opening Plenary for an incisive, far-reaching conversation about disruption and patient care. The conversation focused on how to manage change from the perspectives of three energetic disrupters.
Lorraine O'Shea presented a reap of how Lily disrupted itself to build a peptide facility in Ireland that reset manufacturing timelines and standards. The alliance between R&D and manufacturing unlocked an accelerated pathway to meeting goals.
Lucia Novak is a passionate patient advocate and clinician with dramatic data on the obesity and diabetes epidemic. She made a case for the need for healthcare clinicians to work with the pharma industry to ensure that innovation is in the best interests of the patient and that disruptions don’t disrupt their lives.
Melissa Seymour articulated the power of change management and leveraging disruption for positive change. With a measured voice and focus on quality, she reminded us that quality should be seen as a value not cost. Ensuring quality is a paragon of systems thinking and needs to be integral to all business processes. Acknowledging that less than 20% of change management activations succeed, we need to think about change differently.
Interesting takeaway?
People act irrationally in predictable ways. And for anyone managing change, people learn 10% from what they hear and 65% from what they do, emphasizing that actions speak louder than words.
Meet the Presenters from the Opening Plenary today for a one-on-one discussion.
Today, 08 April | Exhibit Hall, Booth 516
09:45 – 10:15 | P1: From Manufacturing Excellence to Patient Impact: The Future of Glp-1 Therapies
On Track Spotlight
The afternoon education sessions ended the day’s program offering rich information and dialog.
The discussion on Metrics Simplified! Avoiding the KPI Doldrums tackled the classic challenge that asserts you can’t improve what you don’t measure. That said, data provides numbers but if the analysis is hard to understand or the data is bad, intelligence is compromised. KPIs need to be actionable and easy to understand. And above all, the right metrics need to be identified to create the benchmarks.
The takeaway?
Keep KPIs simple, ensure they are actionable, iterate, improve as you go, and support KPIs with accountabilities.
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