diff --git a/posts/2023-08-30_pharmaverse_story/pharmaverse_story.qmd b/posts/2023-08-30_pharmaverse_story/pharmaverse_story.qmd index a378145a..fe66c7e1 100644 --- a/posts/2023-08-30_pharmaverse_story/pharmaverse_story.qmd +++ b/posts/2023-08-30_pharmaverse_story/pharmaverse_story.qmd @@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ long_slug <- "2023-08-30_pharmaverse_story" -**Pharmaverse: from motivation to present** +Pharmaverse: from motivation to present Since the Australian Aboriginal, the earliest peoples recorded to have inhabited the Earth and who have been in Australia for at least 65,000 to 80,000 years ([Encyclopædia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal)), human beings live in group. Whether to protect yourself, increase your life expectancy or simply share tasks. @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ For most aspects of life, it doesn't make sense to think, act or work alone for The English poet John Donne used to say *"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;"*. I can't disagree with him. -And I dare say that Michael Rimler (GSK), Michael Stackhouse (Atorus), Ross Farrugia (Roche), and Sumesh Kalappurakal (Janssen) agree with me. +And I dare say that Ari Siggaard Knoph (Novo Nordisk), Michael Rimler (GSK), Michael Stackhouse (Atorus), Ross Farrugia (Roche), and Sumesh Kalappurakal (Janssen) can't disagree with him either. They are the founders of [pharmaverse](https://pharmaverse.org/), members of its Council and kindly shared their memories of how independent companies, in mid-2020, worked together in the creation of a set of packages developed to support the clinical reporting pipeline. If you are not familiar with this pipeline, the important thing to know is that, in a nutshell, pharmaceutical companies must follow a bunch of standardized procedures and formats (from Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium, [CDISC](https://www.cdisc.org/)) when submitting clinical results to Health Authorities. @@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ Rationally, we can say that companies face the same challenges in these steps of Irrationally, we can also say they were working in silos on that. Just as Isaac Newton and Gottfried W. Leibniz [independently developed the theory of infinitesimal calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus), pharmaceutical companies were independently working on R solutions for this pipeline. -But in 2018, more precisely in August 16 and 17, they gathered at the first edition of [R/Pharma conference](https://rinpharma.com/) to discuss R and open-source tooling for drug development (the reasons why open-source is an advantageous approach can be found in this [post](https://pharmaverse.github.io/blog/posts/2023-07-20_cross_company_dev/cross_industry_dev.html) written by Stefan Thoma). +But in 2018, on August 16 and 17, they gathered at the first edition of [R/Pharma conference](https://rinpharma.com/) to discuss R and open-source tooling for drug development (the reasons why open-source is an advantageous approach can be found in this [post](https://pharmaverse.github.io/blog/posts/2023-07-20_cross_company_dev/cross_industry_dev.html) written by Stefan Thoma). And according to Isabela Velásquez's article, [Pharmaverse: Packages for clinical reporting workflows](https://posit.co/blog/pharmaverse-packages-for-clinical-reporting-workflows/), one of the most popular questions in this conference was "Is the package code available or on [CRAN](https://cran.r-project.org/)?". Well, many of them were. @@ -53,20 +53,20 @@ And not necessarily at that date, but just to mention a few: [*pharmaRTF*](https The thing is that were almost 10000 other packages as well (today, almost 20000). And that took to another two questions: -1. With this stifling and overwhelming number of packages on CRAN, how to find the ones related to "clinical reporting problems"? +1. With this overwhelming number of packages on CRAN, how to find the ones related to solving "clinical reporting problems"? 2. Once the packages were found, how to choose which one to use among those that have the same functional purpose? So, again, companies re-started to working in silos to find those answers. But now, in collaborative silos and with common goals: create extremely useful packages to solve pharmaceutical-specific gaps once and solve them well! -From Stackhouse's report, Michael Rimler and he talked and ultimately formed a partnership between GSK and Atorus to develop a few more packages, including [*metacore*](https://github.com/atorus-research/metacore), [*xportr*](https://github.com/atorus-research/xportr), and *timber* (which became [*logrx*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/logrx). +In 2020, Michael Stackhouse and Michael Rimler talked and formed a partnership between Atorus and GSK to develop a few more packages, including [*metacore*](https://github.com/atorus-research/metacore), to read, store and manipulate metadata for ADaMs/SDTMs in a standardized object; [*xportr*](https://github.com/atorus-research/xportr), to create submission compliant SAS transport files and perform pharma specific dataset level validation checks; and [*logrx*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/logrx) (ex-*timber*), to build log to support reproducibility and traceability of an R script. Around the same time, Thomas Neitmann (actual Denali Therapeutics, ex-Roche) and Rimler discovered that both were working with ADaM in R, so Ross and Rimler saw an opportunity there and GSK started their partnership with Roche to build and release [*admiral*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/admiral) package. The idea of working together, the sense of community, and the appetite from organizations built more and more, with incentive and priority established up into the programming heads council. -Janssen had a huge effort in building R capabilities going on as well, by releasing [*tidytlg*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/tidytlg) and [*envsetup*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/envsetup)), so eventually Rimler, Stackhouse and Ross formalized [pharmaverse](https://pharmaverse.org/) and formed the council, adding in Sumesh (Janssen) and Ari Siggaard Knoph (Novo Nordisk) later joined as the fifth council member.. +Janssen had a huge effort in building R capabilities going on as well, by releasing [*tidytlg*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/tidytlg) and [*envsetup*](https://github.com/pharmaverse/envsetup)), so eventually Rimler, Stackhouse and Ross formalized [pharmaverse](https://pharmaverse.org/) and formed the council, adding in Sumesh (Janssen) and Ari Siggaard Knoph (Novo Nordisk) later joined as the fifth council member. At the end of their presentation ["Closing the Gap: Creating an End to End R Package Toolkit for the Clinical Reporting Pipeline."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW9qp5QOlIU), in [R/Pharma 2021](https://rinpharma.com/event/rinpharma2021/), Ben Straub's (GSK) and Eli Miller's (Atorus) welcomed the community to the [pharmaverse](https://pharmaverse.org/), a new group of packages developed by various pharmaceutical companies to support open-source clinical workflows.