As our passion is to connect people and companies we know, like and respect to other people and companies we know, like and respect, we open the meeting by asking everyone to put the link to their LinkedIn profile in the chat window. This facilitates future communication and connections. 

Before we started on the focus of the evening’s session we shared industry information, gossip and news. Some people were preparing to attend OCT New England and CNS Summit. 

At this point, we had 23 attendees and we turned to the topic at hand. What is causing the industry slow down? We chose the topic as we’d been hearing from various sources about how slow things are. One 200 person CRO, in business for 15 years said they’ve never seen it so slow with no pending proposals and no RFPs being issued. People in job search mode have stated that open positions don’t seem to be getting filled. Recruiters in our industry state that job hiring decision are being slow walked. One CRO said they’ve been awarded a project six months ago and study start up activities are moving at a snail’s pace. 

A number of factors were discussed and are bulleted below. Overall it comes down to uncertainty about the near term future.

• Unintended consequences of the Inflation Reduction Act and the impact of Medicare mandated price negotiations
• 2024 is a US presidential election year
• The war between Ukraine and Russia
• The war between Israel and Hamas
• Inflation
• Concerns over a recession
• All this makes for tight capital markets

The presentation which was put together ahead of time and subsequently additional pieces of information were added and if you would like a copy of it, please email me at chris@focmnetworking.com

After discussion of this, we had enough time to move into break-out rooms of 2-4 people for about 10 minutes and did this two or three times.

It was announced that the November 15 event would feature a focus on patient recruitment with iEnroll Digital leading the discussion. 

Attendees:
Joseph Cheng, PiVOT
Lauren Merante, UNC Graduate pursuing a career in the clinical research industry
Steve Sisson, MLM Central Labs
Matt Stumm, Stark/Raving
Gabrielle DeBoer, Stark/Raving
Sarah Ebner, Investigator Support Services
Mike O’Gorman, Life Science Marketplace
Sara Tylosky, Farmacon
Violet Votin, Machaon Diagnostics
Lakshmi Ethirajan, SmaBio Labs
Maggie Phipps, SUNY Graduate pursuing a career in the clinical research industry
Viljena Trask, Syneos Health
Joan Chambers, Greater Gift
Gideon Adjorgenu, PharmD, Fresenius Kabi
Brian Langin, Consultant
Eliana Rivera-Burke, GreenLight Clinical
Ira Snyder, Consultant

GLSA Attendees:
Megan Hoffman
Jeff Sedgley
Denise McNerney
Charity Dube
Timmina William
Chris Matheus

Reminder of the meetings’ guidelines: 

• Think of this as an open house event – drop in when you can and leave when you need to; 
• When we have a presenter we have them start when we have assembled a strong amount of respondents – usually 10-15 minutes after the start. 
• Presenters’ topics are not sales pitches – the focus is on an aspect of clinical trials; where in the process their services are used and aspects of that step. 
• The link to get the GLSA newsletter and notifications about future live and virtual events:  http://bit.ly/3UTb8hL
• We ask everyone to put their LinkedIn link into the chat to facilitate connecting and future follow up. 
• To read the May summary https://globallifesciencesalliance.com/the-may-focm-glsa-networking-event/