The value of senior relationships cannot be understated in any market but may be considered particularly important in Japan. Matador's experience is that in Japan transformational change almost inevitably requires senior executive sponsorship and that consequently, dialogue at board level is an absolute must.

To this end Matador took the opportunity during the visit of John Hall, SVP Europe and APAC at CluePoints and an acknowledged thought leader on risk-based quality management (RBQM) to engage some of Japan's most influential pharmaceutical executives.

The Matador Marketing team identified several top-ten Japanese pharmaceutical executives and contacted them individually in Japanese to ensure they were aware of the event and of the subject matter to be discussed. We were delighted that the plans were so warmly received and that five executives took time out of their schedules to join us.

Each organisation and each person had their own ideas and of course explained the experiences and issues that lay behind these thoughts. It was refreshing to see how willing everybody was to share their views regarding Deep Learning and AI's potential impact on clinical trials.

James Hawrylak, Matador Director for Clinical wrote :

I was a little nervous prior to our first CluePoints executive lunch but as always our colleagues from Japanese pharma participated extremely positively, sharing their views openly as well as listening intently. Without doubt machine learning and AI will transform clinical development just as it will every other aspect of our lives but for me the takeaway was the extent to which our clients' executive teams are already ahead of the curve in this regard.