End of Year Update from the pharmaverse Council

2023 Was a Big Year

This was a big year for open-source work in clinical submissions in general. We saw Roche speak about shifting to an open-source backbone for clinical trials. Novo Nordisk spoke publicly of an R based submission to the FDA. These are true marks of progress being made in R becoming a first class language for clinical reporting.

Back in August, Nicholas Eugenio released a blog post on the history of pharmaverse. It’s funny to think about the fact that only 3 years ago, the idea of cross organization collaboration on R packages and building a community around this in the clinical world was just a conversation between friends. Since then, we have a community of more than 1200 people on Slack, 350 on LinkedIn, interest from over 150 organizations, and over 30 packages. If 2020 through 2022 was the birth of pharmaverse, 2023 was finding our identity as a community. For the council, 2024 will be about continuing to mature and find more ways that we can continue to support the community.

What We Accomplished

One of our biggest moves in 2023 was to form our partnership with PHUSE. This latched us into an existing community with shared values and a platform that helps us continue to build the pharmaverse community. At the PHUSE EU Connect we had our first opportunity to host a pharmaverse meetup and bring together pharmaverse contributors in person. Additionally, there was an excellent panel session highlighting our use and adoption of open-source across industry, including the pharmaceutical, commercial, and software perspectives. As we move forward, we’ll continue to use this platform to find ways we can host events and encourage collaboration within the pharmaverse community.

This year our community was also able to launch new platforms to share updates and knowledge throughout the industry. The pharmaverse examples webpage was launched to show pharmaverse packages in action, and the pharmaverse blog (which I’m using right here!) provides a platform to share updates and community news.

Where Next?

Back in October, I had the opportunity to do an interview with Michael Rimler for the PHUSE video series Open Source Technologies in Clinical Data Analytics. The last question he asked me was what I expect the state of data analytics in life science to be in 2 to 3 years. My response was that when that time comes, I hope I couldn’t have predicted where we would be - because back in 2020 I could never have predicted where we are now. The progress we’ve made is unbelievable, and the pharmaverse community has played a huge role in getting us where we are today. For the pharmaverse community, I hope to see that progress continue as we move into next year. As a council, our goal is to continue to mature this community. How can we support and foster collaboration between our organizations? How can we leverage this platform to drive the industry forward?

For you as an individual, there’s always an opportunity to get involved - and you don’t have to be a package developer to contribute. You can join a working group, write examples, or author a blog post. Furthermore, you can get started with the pharmaverse packages, provide feedback via issues, and advocate for their use within your own organization. The pharmaverse community doesn’t exist without you, and we’re happy to have you all here to help us build this together.

P.S.

At PHUSE US Connect 2024 this coming February, be on the lookout for one of the keynote presentations from Michael Rimler and Ross Farrugia! We hope to see you there!

Here’s to a 2024 full of progress and collaboration!

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Last updated

2024-05-08 15:38:00.423652

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