Patrick Reilly   00:00

Welcome to the Medical Affairs Professional Society Medical Information Focus Area Working Group’s two-part podcast series entitled COVID-19 Cross Industry Collaboration. In this first podcast we will discuss the how and why of coming together. I am Patrick Reilly, and I’ll be the moderator for this podcast. I am a member of the MAPS Medical Information Focus Area Working Group, and also currently the CEO of phactMI.The views in this recording are those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect on the opinions of MAPS or the companies with which they are affiliated. This presentation is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as a legal or regulatory advice. We encourage you to engage in conversations about medical information with other MAPS members via MAPS Connect on the MAPS website or mobile app. Simply log in with the email address and password associated with your MAPS account and access the global community. Then click on the discuss tab and scroll down to medical information to post a question or review previous postings. The podcast objectives are to describe the motivation of the companies to participate in a collaboration list the reasons for the collaboration to form and identify the goals for the collaboration. I’d like to thank today’s panelists for sharing their subject matter expertise with the MAPS membership. Speaking today our Leena agenda PharmD senior director medical information content strategy and innovation Janssen Scientific Affairs, Steven Hays PharmD, Director, medical information vaccines North America Pfizer and Truc Dinh PharmD, Senior Manager global medical information Gilead Leena, Steven, Truc, can you please provide some background and your current position?

Leena Jindia   02:12

Hi, everyone. I’m Leena Jindia. I have been with the pharmaceutical industry for close to 30 years. I’m a pharmacologist and a pharmacist by training when the pandemic hit it was it became ever more critical to deliver consistent and timely scientific responses worldwide. Hence, we all came together to share best practices over to Steve.

Steven Hays   02:37

Thanks, Leena. So hi everyone. I had a career in hospital pharmacy before first moving into an industry role first with wide pharmaceuticals and I’ve now been with Pfizer medical information for 12 years. And I’m currently serving as the lead of an amazing team supporting the Pfizer vaccines portfolio in the US and Canada.

Truc Dinh   02:57

You My name is Truc Dinh, I started my career in medical information four years ago, I’m also a pharmacist by training, and I completed a fellowship focused on medical information then continued my career at Gilead and medical information. Or I’m currently a senior manager in global and US medical information leading the COVID-19 therapeutic area.

Patrick Reilly   03:17

That’s great. And again, thanks all of you for joining today. Before we begin, I’m just going to go through a few quick definitions of some terms that will be used in the podcast. The first term is e u A. That stands for emergency use authorization. This is a process that allows pharmaceutical companies to the ability to provide early access to products and development during public health emergencies, such as the COVID 19 pandemic. Mi. This stands for medical information a function within pharmaceutical manufacturing companies that plays a significant role in supporting the information needs of the medical community, patients and caregivers by providing the most up to date accurate information on their company products. The Amite function also provides customer insights that can inform clinical trial development, as well as product life cycle planning. And last phactMI. This is the pharma collaboration for transparent medical information. It is a nonprofit consortium of medical information leaders from over 30 pharmaceutical companies committed to both shaping the future and elevating the practice of medical information. So now that we’ve acclimated everyone to the lingo, we will start the conversation and Truc I’ll start with you. How did the various companies come together for this COVID-19 collaboration

Truc Dinh   04:44

COVID-19 Thank you for the question. COVID-19 was a very unique situation and for us we were the first company to receive an E way for COVID-19 therapy. And we were able to later come together through this factor my collaborator Chevron, and connect with colleagues are on this panel across the industry to share our best practices. And really, this was a unique situation and COVID-19 was a very critical situation. But it gave us that opportunity to come together and be a part of a solution for the global pandemic.

Steven Hays   05:17

It was obvious that each company was asking themselves the same questions internally about conducting business during this unprecedented time. Fortunately, phactMI presented the opportunity for a few member companies with COVID-19 specific medicines and vaccines to come together in a uniquely informal manner to learn from each other.

Leena Jindia   05:37

And Patrick, to add on to that factor, my member companies involved in the development of COVID-19 products, whether it be vaccines or therapies, really came together to share information, as we all chartered into this unfamiliar territory of emergency use authorization, or EUA. Hence, we came together to discuss the process planning and preparation of the medical information teams during this global pandemic situation.

Patrick Reilly   06:09

That’s great. And again, thanks, everybody for that background in terms of how everybody came together. But I’m curious, Leena, why were you comfortable participating in this group? I mean, the reality is, you’re all competitors. And I’m just curious why you were all pulled together or why you were comfortable coming together?

Leena Jindia   06:31

Sure. That’s a great question, Patrick. And we often get this question. Well, over the years, we have developed strong confidence, trust and relationships within the phactMI network, which has really made us comfortable, despite being competitors to come together to share learnings and best practices related to medical information. And in this particular case, COVID related activities with the ultimate goal of providing timely medical information to our customers. The work stream always kept the phactMI antitrust guidelines in mind throughout the engagement, which helped helped us tremendously.

Truc Dinh   07:16

And I agree with Leena, and to add on that element of trust, we have the report, and we have built strong relationships and networks through our prior experiences, in phactMI. In addition to that, the idea of integrity, you want to do what’s right for the patients and the healthcare community impacting providers, patients, payers, are really working together to share those best practices and learnings to each other to help benefit the patient’s

Steven Hays   07:44

Well said Leena and Truc obviously, there was an established trust within our organization about collaborating within the phactMI current community, and if you recall, pharmaceutical companies as a whole, were collaborating in new ways. Also, to combat that pandemic, initially, companies reached agreements to actually share manufacturing resources. So we thought to ourselves, if we can collaborate at that level, we should be able to do so at a medical information level as well. Right? So in the end, it was all about doing right by our patients.

Patrick Reilly   08:14

So building off that trust you had Truc, what was the reason the rationale for really coming together here?

Truc Dinh   08:21

Yeah, feel like it was a call to action. It was a global pandemic. And we were all in this together, there was urgency, it was a very unprecedented situation that we all have not been through before. And I felt that we were really lucky to be a part of this phactMI network that has a platform for us to use to come together, and to share experiences and best practices to learn from each other, and leverage each other’s knowledge and experiences.

Steven Hays   08:46

I couldn’t agree more with you, Truc. In fact, we knew that we couldn’t leave any options on the table to ensure that we were meeting the needs of our patients. Personally, I knew that I needed to better understand the EUA process from a medical information standpoint, and what better way to learn than to connect, to actually connect with a counterpart from a company that recently began supporting a medication under in the UAE.

Leena Jindia   09:08

Yeah, and to build on to what Truc and Steve just said, the speed at which each company had to be prepared for the provision of medical information. Both the UAE approval for the COVID product, as well as the unknown of operating in a pandemic situation, were the key drivers for all of us to come together. The goal was to help each other through our individual learnings and best practice sharing with the overall goal to provide timely medical information.

Patrick Reilly   09:42

Well, I’ll just say it’s an amazing accomplishment. I think it’s a real tribute to all of you and the companies that participated in this. We’ll hear more in a second podcast as it relates to some of your experiences, lesson learned and so forth. But I just again, wanted to thank all of the speakers on But but before I do that I just wanted to review again, the takeaways the objectives of this particular podcast. And again, it was to describe the motivation of the companies to participate in the collaboration. list the reasons for the collaboration, identify the goals for the collaborations. Hopefully everyone listening, you have a clearer sense of that. But I would also invite you to participate in the second podcast we’ll get into more of the specifics around lessons learned, and so forth. Again, thank you to our speakers Leena Jindia, Steven Hays, Truc Dinh. This has been the first podcast in a series on this topic. The next podcast will discuss the what of the collaboration and the specific topics covered by the group. If you’d like to learn more about phactMI, please visit our website, phactMI.org For more information if you are a MAPS member, thank you for your support of MAPS. If you’re not yet a MAPS member and we’d like to gain access to additional resources in this area, please visit the MAPS website to explore joining today at MedicalAffairs.org/membership. This concludes the podcast.