Eric White, MD (left), Jesse Roman-Rodriguez, MD, and Craig Conoscenti, MD, listen to comments Sunday afternoon from an attendee of the Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology Assembly Working Group on Lung Fibrosis at ATS 2013.
To build on the momentum of previous meetings regarding fibrosis research, representatives from academia, industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and patient advocacy groups took part in the Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology Assembly Working Group on Lung Fibrosis at ATS 2013 on Sunday afternoon.
“This is a bit of an experiment in progress,” said Eric White, MD, associate professor of medicine and pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was co-chair of the meeting. “I was told there has never been this type of meeting at ATS before.”
Jesse Roman-Rodriguez, MD, professor of medicine and pharmacology/toxicology; chair in the department of medicine at the University of Louisville, Ky., and Craig Conoscenti, MD, director, IPF program areas lead, clinical development and medical affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., were also co-chairs.
Many of the nearly 50 attendees shared their ideas on how the various representatives of the field could work together.
Jerry Eu, MD, program director of the Immunology and Fibrosis Section for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, was one of many to suggest a more centralized approach.
“We need to have a more efficient way to move this field forward,” Dr. Eu said, “including collecting samples from different kinds of clinical trials sponsored by academics, by NIH, and by the pharmaceutical industry. We need to think about the mechanism, a consortium-type of arrangement that can facilitate research.”
Industry participants unanimously agreed in principle to provide bio samples from patients in the placebo arm of various clinical trials into a neutral biorepository that could be accessed by the greater investigative community. All participants expressed significant enthusiasm for continuing the dialogue to begin to “cone down” on details revolving around processes of sample acquisition, processing, storage, and distribution.
Dr. White expressed hope that the meeting will encourage an ongoing dialogue between the various representatives of the field.
“There needs to be some sort of understanding that there aren’t enough patients to go around for us to make a difference in one lifetime unless we work together to do it,” he said.
Getting these representatives together during ATS 2013, including industry competitors, was relatively easy, Dr. Conoscenti said.
“There’s always crosstalk going on,” he said. “From the perspective of the pulmonologists and the pulmonary scientists from each of the pharmaceutical firms, we come to a meeting like this and it’s not unusual for us to speak together.”