Recently, Vikram and I attended the first conference of the Indian Society for Study of Xenobiotics, held at the JN Tata Auditorium, IISc in Bangalore. The conference is the first of its kind that I have attended and I was very impressed by the wide variety of topics presented and had a great time interacting with the pharma community. Initially, the conference was scheduled for three days which was cut short to two due to the transport strike in Bangalore. However, the organizers rearranged the talks so that the schedule was covered in two intense days so that the attendees had minimum inconvenience and change in their travel plans (many thanks!).
On the scientific side, I gained knowledge on the several issues related to toxicity during drug development and options to deal with these. I also learnt about the importance of drug transport mechanisms in determination of drug efficacy. As a person who is relatively new to the pharma field, these are new topics to explore and understand. In QSP modeling, there is a greater focus on the physiological and pharmacodynamic aspects of disease and therapy, so this conference was an eye opener in terms of the earlier stages of drug development and pharmacokinetics. There were several talks on IVIVE, PK and PBPK modeling, which I enjoyed. A glimpse of the future of therapy was seen in the talks on Pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine. I found the mix of overview talks, detailed technical presentations, young scientist presentations and vendor presentations to be particularly useful in engaging my attention due to the variety of presentation styles and topics covered.
We had presented a poster on QSP modeling where we discussed several kinds of models we have used at Vantage. I was happy that there was a lot of interest and discussion around the poster from the community. I look forward to extending our network in the Indian pharma community and expanding our modeling horizons.
I’ve attached a picture of our poster at the conference. Take a look and send your feedback/comments!
