2018 Conference

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.

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.

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.