Safety Analytics

greg.ball@asapprocess.co

After graduating from Northwestern University with a bachelor's in economics, Greg served in the Navy for 4 years and taught high school math and physics for 5 years before going back to school to get a master's in applied statistics from Purdue University. Eventually, while working as a statistician, he earned his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Texas Health Science Centre. Gregs current research on blinded safety monitoring procedures emerged from his early work at academic medical centres (MD Anderson and the Methodist Hospital) and CRO's (West and Quintiles), developed into his college dissertation and continues to be developed in collaboration with statistical and clinical scientists from several pharmaceutical companies (Astellas, AbbVie and Merck). Greg established, with Bill Wang, the ASA Biopharm Safety Monitoring Working Group and is pioneering the joint DIA-ASA Interdisciplinary Safety Evaluation (DAISE) scientific Working Group, to advocate for aggregate safety assessments and cross-disciplinary scientific engagement.

S.Proestel@Medpace.com

Scott Proestel, MD, is Vice President of Medical Informatics at Medpace. He completed his internal medicine training at Johns Hopkins Hospital and obtained his medical degree from Columbia University. He is board certified in internal medicine and clinical informatics, and prior to joining Medpace he worked at the US FDA for 19 years as a medical officer, team leader and division director in both pre-market review and post-market safety surveillance. While at the FDA Scott conducted research into using artificial intelligence to evaluate spontaneous safety reports submitted to the FDA and using large language models to query documents. In addition, he served at the US NIH as a Deputy Director and then Director of the Office for Policy in Clinical Research Operations in the Division of AIDS, where he oversaw operations for six global clinical trial networks. Prior to joining the federal government, Scott was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University.

RGordon2@its.jnj.com

Mac Gordon has a master’s in statistics and graduate certificates in public health, pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology and has been with Johnson and Johnson for 15 years and in industry for 20 years. He has been involved with lupus research since joining the organisation, with focus areas in late-development immunology and clinical trial safety. Mac has been heavily involved in pharmacovigilance, signal detection and safety data visualisation for most of his career, including membership in several multi-disciplinary industry/regulatory working groups. Prior to joining Johnson and Johnson, Mac developed a safety surveillance and signal detection team at Cephalon. He is currently the Clinical Team Statistical Lead across 11 indications and several therapeutic areas. Outside of clinical research, Mac is involved in many internal teams focused on safety statistics and process development initiatives and continues to represent the organisation in external safety working groups.

EUnger@hpm.com

Ellis F. Unger, MD, is a Principal Drug Regulatory Expert at Hyman, Phelps & McNamara, a leading consulting FDA law firm. Dr Unger is a board-certified cardiologist, who retired from the US Food and Drug Administration following a 24-year career, where he served in senior leadership roles in the Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) – initially as the Director of the Office of Drug Evaluation-I, and subsequently as the Director of the Office of Cardiology, Hematology, Endocrinology and Nephrology. The divisions under his direction oversaw the regulation of drugs for cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric, neurologic, endocrine, metabolic and hematologic disorders. Dr Unger obtained his medical degree from the University of Cincinnati, and he received post-doctoral training at what was formerly known as the Medical College of Virginia (internal medicine) and The Johns Hopkins Hospital (clinical cardiology). Throughout his FDA career, Dr Unger was well known for his insights into the analysis, interpretation and display of various forms of data. He was also recognised as a leader in the safety assessment of drugs and biologics, as well as the consideration of complex benefit-risk scenarios. Dr Unger was involved in drafting dozens of FDA Guidance documents and participated in numerous working groups (including the FDA’s Benefit-Risk framework). He served as a key FDA representative on many International Council for Harmonization (ICH) Expert Working Groups, making important contributions to several safety-related guidelines: E2F (Development Safety Update Report, DSUR), E2C(R2) (Periodic Benefit-Risk Evaluation Report, PBRER) and E19 (Safety Data Collection), as well as M4E(R2), the benefit-risk section of the Common Technical Document.