Beyond Celiac has been working hard to advance pharmaceutical therapies for people with celiac disease since we know that the gluten-free diet is not an effective solution for most of our community. People with celiac disease suffer ongoing symptoms from gluten exposure, and this puts them at risk for long-term health consequences.

One of the ways that we engage with the pharmaceutical sector is by representing the celiac disease community and advocating for your needs within the organizations and events that influence leaders within the biopharmaceutical world.

The 2016 DIA Patient Fellows

One such organization is the Drug Information Association (DIA), who hosted their annual meeting in Philadelphia on June 26-30, 2016. This year, Jennifer North, Vice President of Beyond Celiac, was honored to be invited to DIA’s annual meeting as a Patient Fellow. She joined a group of nearly 20 other patient advocates to ensure that the patient community is well represented as DIA promotes patient-centered research that helps people get the medicines they want and need faster.

In 2013, Kristin Voorhees, MA, Beyond Celiac Director of Healthcare Initiatives served as a Patient Fellow and has been representing the team at the meeting in the years since.

For more than 50 years, DIA has served as a global forum for all those involved in drug development to exchange knowledge and collaborate in a neutral setting. DIA is an essential resource that provides opportunities to extend debate and discussion to advance scientific and medical innovation. With representatives of not only biopharma, but also from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), clinical trial operators and patient advocacy organizations, the conference served as an important catalyst to help Beyond Celiac identify appropriate partners, learn more about engaging our community in different stages of clinical trial development and build partnerships with other patient organizations working in the autoimmune space. DIA offers lots of formats for organizations to connect, including workshops, panel discussions and other structured and unstructured interactions. The more patient advocates become involved in these types of networks, the more we can ensure that new pharmaceutical therapies are developed with patient wants and needs at the heart of innovation.