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title: Fall 2018 Newsletter
description: Read all our latest news in the Metrum Research Group Fall 2018 Newsletter!
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 A new client service, new presentation materials, community service and more!

| Not rendering correctly? View this email as a web page here.     Metrum Headlines Metrum offering new Technology Services to clients Our team is working with clients to deliver end-to-end solutions that support quantitative decision making. Devin Pastoor, Ph.D., Senior Director of Engineering Services, specializes in bridging the unique characteristics of each client’s IT structure with the needs of the scientific team. This unit broadens the services Metrum is able to offer to our clients, particularly on the infrastructure side. Some examples include: Providing strategies (design, roll out, and support) to migrate from existing tools (SAS/Tableau) to more modern, open, cloud-based workflows; Developing decision-support dashboards to promote direct executive engagement; Building and testing prototype workflows and tools to explore potential solutions to business challenges. We would be happy to discuss how these services can benefit you and your M&S team!    Metrum honored to be a 2018 Marcum Tech Top 40 Award recipient  The Connecticut Technology Council (CTC) and Marcum LLP announced the 2018 Marcum Tech Top 40, the annual recognition of the fastest growing technology companies in Connecticut. This year’s group of top-ranked companies will be honored at the new ConnectiTECH Awards event at the Connecticut Convention Center on October 3. This marks the eighth time Metrum Research Group has been chosen as a Marcum Tech Top 40 recipient.  Marc R. Gastonguay, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Metrum Research Group, commented “All credit for our recognition as a Marcum Tech Top 40 company goes to the incredibly talented, bright, and hard-working employees of Metrum Research Group. This is a particularly meaningful honor for our company as it recognizes the amazing tech companies in our home state of CT, a state where many of our staff were educated, or developed on-the-job experience and skills.” New features added to mrgsolve There have been some new features rolled out in the evaluation version of mrgsolve. We have a new formal code block called $PRED that allows users to write models that don't utilize differential equations and where model predictions can be expressed in closed form.  For example, users can use $PRED to code an Emax model that utilizes daily AUC (either simulated in the model or in the input data) to drive the effect. While users have always been able to code models like these in mrgsolve, there is now a formal code block to do this.  There are also new, relaxed input data set requirements when coding models with $PRED. Also new in the development version is a mechanism to allow users to schedule events or interventions from within the model itself, rather than requiring the events to be encoded in the input data set. For example, users might wish to create a discontinuity in the simulation where a modeled parameter changes value at a specific time that may not already be included in the data set.  Users can now create events like these from within the model itself. The advantage with this approach is that the state of the model at any given time can be utilized to determine the characteristics of the event (for example, what time in the future should the parameter change value?). Please read more about  $PRED and modeled interventions on the mrgsolve blog.  We're excited to introduce these features for people to test and use on a provisional basis.  Hopefully, this functionality will be ready for release into a version on CRAN in the near future. Presentations & Publications Award received at ACCP Annual Meeting Dr. Marc Gastonguay was awarded the Bristol-Myers Squibb Mentorship in Clinical Pharmacology award at the ACCP annual meeting. In Marc's acceptance speech, he stressed the importance of open science. His notes will be posted on our website soon. Marc also co-chaired the conference session entitled "Methodological & Statistical Considerations in Pediatric & Rare Disease Drug Development: External Control Groups & Dose Selection", along with Gopichand Gottipati, Ph.D. ACCP Janelle Hajjar, M.S., presented "Population pharmacokinetic modeling of enzyme replacement therapy ATB200 and pharmacological chaperone AT2221 in adult patients with Pompe Disease and simulation to predict adolescent exposures" at ACCP in Bethesda, MD in September. ISoP NE At the ISoP NE event in Cambridge, MA, Ahmed Elmokadem, Ph.D., presented "Evaluating the impact of estimated partition coefficients by different methods using a unified PBPK model" and Marc Gastonguay, Ph.D., presented "Open and transparent pharmacometrics publication process" held in September. R/Medicine Madeleine Gastonguay presented "Development of an open and general physiologically-based pharmacokinetic model to predict maternal-fetal exposures for drugs metabolized by CYP isoenzymes" at the R/Medicine Conference held in New Haven, CT in September. R/Pharma At the first annual R/Pharma conference held in Boston, MA in August, the following MetrumRG employees gave presentations: Rena Eudy-Byrne, Ph.D., "The use of R in the development of physiological model for healthy growth" Jia Kang, Ph.D., "Assisting pharmacometric simulation with the use of Shiny" Marc Gastonguay, Ph.D., "R as the core technology to support modeling and simulation in pharma research, development, and post approval activities" Devin Pastoor, Ph.D., "Moving fast without breaking things: navigating the R ecosystem in an enterprise environment" StanCon At the StanCon conference held in Helsinki, Finland in August, Yi Zhang, Ph.D., and William Gillespie, Ph.D., presented "Bayesian inference with partial differential equations using Stan" and, along with Minjie Zhu, Ph.D., also shared a poster.  Stan for Pharmacometrics William Gillespie, Ph.D., gave a presentation on "Torsten: Stan functions for pharmacometrics applications" at the "Stan for Phamacometrics" event in Paris, France in July. American Pediatrics Healthcare & Infectious Diseases Congress Rena Eudy-Bryne, Ph.D., presented "A Model of the Effects of GI Disease and Diet on Child Body Composition in Order to Improve Outcomes in Those Suffering from Malnutrition" at the7th American Pediatrics Healthcare & Infectious Diseases Congress in Vancouver, Canada at the end of June. Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop "Bayesian Data Analysis using Stan/Torsten for Pharmacometric Applications" was presented by William Gillespie, Ph.D., in Indianapolis, IN, earlier this year in May. Newly Added Courses  Advanced Use of Stan, RStan and Torsten for Pharmacometric Applications This one day workshop presented at the PAGE 2018 meeting in Montreux, Switzerland on 29 May 2018. Introduction to mrgsolve (PAGE workshop, 2018) This course was delivered at the PAGE 2018 meeting in Montreux, Switzerland on June 2, 2018.   You can find all of these and more on the Metrum Research Group website.   Metrum News to Note   MRG Promotions Congratulations to the following well-deserved promotions: Jonathan French, Sc.D., Fellow Curtis Johnston, Pharm.D., Senior Scientist II Dan Polhamus, Ph.D., Principal Scientist I Jayson Wilbur, Ph.D., Principal Scientist I Jia Kang, Ph.D., Senior Scientist I Kyle Baron, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Principal Scientist I Nathanael Dirks, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Principal Scientist I Jim Marsan, Senior Director of Resource and Project Management Danielle Dunn, Senior Accounting Manager Heidi Seaborg, Resourcing & Contracts Manager    Welcome to the Metrum team! We're excited to announce these additions to the Metrum team: Eric Burroughs, M.S. - Principal Scientist II Shona Kidd - Documentation & Process Manager Jill Wallace - Client Relationship Coordinator Devin Pastoor Ph.D. - Senior Director of Engineering Services Katherine Kay, Ph.D. - Research Scientist Jessica Krystle Roberts, Ph.D., MSCI - Research Associate I Michael Heathman, M.S. -  Group Leader, Principal Scientist II To learn more about any of our team, visit our website. Metrum in the Community: Habitat for Humanity Employees took part in a community service day in May, working with Habitat for Humanity in the Hartford area. Paint brushes and power tools were used to renovate a house, helping make the dream of homeownership a reality for families living in need. Eleven staff members were able to dedicate the day to volunteer to participate in A Brush with Kindness, a program assisting low-income families.    Metrum in the Community:  MS Walk Employees and families enjoyed participating in a local MS Walk in September. Metrum Research Group was also proud to be a local sponsor for the event, helping to raise money and awareness for this disease and those it affects.                                     It's almost time for ACoP9 Find Metrum at ACoP9: Stop by our exhibit booth - # 8 & 9 - we'd love to say hello to you! Check out presentations and posters by MRG employees: Matthew Riggs, Ph.D., James Rogers, Ph.D., Kyle Baron, Ph.D., William Gillespie, Ph.D., Janelle Hajjar, M.S., and Ahmed Elmokadem, Ph.D. We will be releasing all of our presented material post ACoP9 via our website. Sign up for a workshop: Bayesian analysis of categorical, count and time-to-event data with Stan, rstanarm and Torsten  Sunday, October 7 Introduction to PBPK modeling in R with mrgsolve  Thursday, October 11 Follow Metrum Research Group to get the latest news!     Metrum Research Group   2 Tunxis Rd #112    Tariffville  Connecticut   06081   United States You received this email because you are subscribed to News & Events Subscription from Metrum Research Group . Update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive.  Unsubscribe from all future emails   |
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