Dr. Keith James, Senior Vice President and Site Head of Pfizer La Jolla will present at the Plenary Keynote session at GTCbio’s 4th Modern Drug Discovery and Development Summit on October 15-17, 2008 at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines in La Jolla, CA.

Dr. James’ will speak on the challenges & opportunities of driving global R&D performance. His presentation will explore approaches taken at Pfizer to transform its R&D organization, encompassing changes in all these dimensions. It will also highlight the progress made to date in terms of hard success measures and the outlook for the future.

Dr. James’ will discuss ideal business models where organizational, therapeutic, technology, internal and external resources are all considered, explaining which dimensions offers the largest potential opportunity for transformation of the pharma R&D model to deliver innovative new therapies cost-effectively and how much progress is being made in pursuit of these changes.

The 4th Modern Drug Discovery & Development Summit features over 150 speakers participating in 6 concurrent conferences, 6 mini sessions and 3 short symposia. Other plenary speakers at the keynote session include John Doll, Commissioner of Patents at the US Patent & Trademark Office, David Nicholson, SVP of Global Project Management at Schering Plough, Ashraf Hanna, VP of Business Development at Genentech and Sandy Macrae, VP of Business Development at GlaxoSmithKline. The 6 tracks will cover Biological Therapeutics, Translational Medicine, Drug Design & Lead Optimization, Emerging Targets &, Pharmacokinetics & Pharmacodynamics and Partnering, Licensing & Outsourcing.

About GTCbio
GTCbio organizes conferences specifically for the biomedical and biopharmaceutical industries. Our goal is to facilitate the exchange of biopharmaceutical and biomedical intelligence between industry leaders, academic and government organizations, and the financial community.

GTCbio is a subsidiary of Global Technology Community, LLC, a privately held company founded in 2002.