Monday, 13^th Sept 2010 sees our first AGM. In addition to serving as a formal meeting of our organization, where new participating board members will be elected to serve through 2011, the AGM is also for our members to ask questions and interact to understand and shape the program and priorities of the Alliance. We look forward to your participation and more importantly your questions.

To provide Pistoia programmes, working group chairs, and domain steering groups with the critical assistance needed to drive projects to fruition, Pistoia's Board of Directors appointed John Wise as its first executive director. John will be accountable for the delivery of the Alliance's work programmes. "I am delighted to have the opportunity to serve the Pistoia Alliance," John says. "This industry alliance has a great vision that will help lower costs and encourage innovation in life sciences R&D."

John has spent his career in life science informatics, working in academia, R&D in the biopharmaceutical sector, and life science consultancy as well as on the technology vendor side of the industry. He has been active in supporting the work of other information-sharing life science organizations including the DIA as well as chairing the PRISM Forum for the past three years. Until this past spring, John was senior director, informatics at Daiichi Sankyo, Ltd., UK.

Pistoia members have spoken at a number of conferences over the past year, including BioIT World and Collaborative Innovation in Biomedicine. Please join us at the following events to learn more about Alliance projects and the organization's broader mission. We often get requests to speak at conferences, so if you would like to speak on behalf of the Alliance, e-mail the Executive Director at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

• The 8th Annual Pharmaceutical 2010 Technology IT Congress Oxford Global, Sept. 15-16, London (Ian Harrow)
• Laboratory Data Management, Sept. 22-23, Boston (Ramesh Durvasula)
• BioIT Europe, Oct. 5-7, Hanover (Eagle Genomics)
• ICIC 2010, Oct. 24, [Vienna] (Ian Harrow)

In addition to conference presentations, the Alliance has also met with several organizations including the BBSRC, BioIT Alliance, IMI, PRISM, and W3C HCLS. Our key aim is to show how the Alliance can work with and support other initiatives for the delivery of key information standards and participate in wider discussions about precompetitive collaboration and its impact on the delivery of informatics services in life science.

The Pistoia Technology Committee met for the first time in July under the leadership of Ray Reichard (Roche). This virtual committee provides technical oversight of deliverables and internal consultancy to working groups. Two virtual meetings are planned for the remainder of the year: a general review of existing Pistoia portfolio and an "ideation" session to identify new opportunities for the Alliance to explore. The virtual committee now has representatives from 11 member companies, but all member companies are invited to send a rep to serve on the committee. Current members are listed below. If you would like to share your expertise with the Pistoia community, please contact Ray Reichard.

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A special issue of Clinical Pharmacology Therapeutics features a series of articles on collaboration and pre-competitive activities. You'll find some perspectives from GSK by Patrick Vallance, et al., a piece by Lilly's Bernard Munos about the cultural changes required to make collaborations effective, and a paper by G. Vargas et al. that marks out some of the challenges of pre-competitive collaboration (many of which relate to the information and vocabulary of the data to be shared). This series highlights the need for strong information standards that can support the changes in the industry to ensure that Information aspects are treated both early on in the analysis of collaborations and also during their delivery.