THIS IS AN ARCHIVED SITE
This site contains information from January 2009-December 2014. Click HERE to go the CURRENT commerce.gov website.

Blog Category: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

Medidata Is Aligned With Trade Mission To Help Transform Global Life Science

Medidata Is Aligned With Trade Mission To Help Transform Global Life Science

Guest blog post by Bryan Spielman, Executive Vice President, Medidata

I am honored to join Secretary Pritzker on the business development mission to Japan and South Korea. Medidata is committed to developing our business and transforming clinical research throughout Asia, and this trip is bringing us invaluable connections to the region’s regulatory and industry leaders in the life sciences.

We are thrilled with Commerce Secretary Pritzker’s active engagement throughout the trip to Japan, and we are looking forward to our time in South Korea. The Commerce Secretary’s staff is doing a phenomenal job to keep us briefed and to take care of us, and they have gone the extra mile to make sure this is a successful trade mission. We were also honored to meet with Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who invited us to the ambassador’s residence in Tokyo to exchange ideas. Secretary Pritzker and Ambassador Kennedy spent a great deal of time with us, and both of their teams have shown they can really roll up their sleeves and get meaningful work done.

During our trip to Japan, we had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and senior leaders from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and we were impressed with his administration’s commitment to drive real change in the Japanese economy. Two of the big initiatives of the prime minister’s economic stimulus plan relate to healthcare and women in the workplace. These issues align nicely with our values as a company—more than 40 percent of Medidata’s Japan office is female—and we are very excited about continuing to invest in Japan.

We also had productive meetings with Japan’s Minister of Health Yasuhisa Shiozaki, senior leadership at the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) in charge of promoting information technology, and Japanese pharma industry leaders. In our conversations, it became clear that the idea of leveraging technology to increase the speed, quality and efficiency in the clinical trials process is clearly front and center in Japan. There is broad recognition that the ever-increasing R&D costs are not sustainable and that technology and new data sources can help.