13th Annual Cold Chain Global Forum: 2015 Speakers (Partial Record)

The former Cold Chain Global Forum website had a speakers page at /Speakers.aspx. An archived copy from the month before the October 2015 event shows the speakers listed at that point. This page gives a sample of that list, not the whole of it.

Verified facts

• An archived /Speakers.aspx page captured on 9 September 2015 was headed for the 13th Annual Cold Chain GDP & Temperature Management Logistics Global Forum, 5 to 9 October 2015, Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center, Boston. It carried the heading “2015 Speakers”. [1]
• That page listed, among others, Michael Zwitkovits, GMP Inspector, Austrian Federal Office for Safety in Health Care (AGES). [1]
• It listed Riekert Bruinink, Group Chairman of the PIC/S GDP Working Group, Dutch Health Care Inspectorate. [1]
• It listed Mary Foster, Chair, Expert Committee, Packaging Storage, United States Pharmacopeia. [1]
• It listed Edward Church, President, ISTA. [1]
• It listed Ronald Schaefer, Project Lead, CEIV Pharma Logistics, IATA. [1]
• It listed Yonghua Gao, Deputy Secretary General, China National Pharmaceutical Packaging Association (CNPPA). [1]
• The page showed more than fifty names in total, from pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, associations and suppliers; the names above are a selection. [1]
• The June 2015 announcement for the same event said sessions would be led by speakers from the Dutch Healthcare Inspectorate, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Gilead Sciences, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech and other organizations. [2]

Additional detail from the sources

• The page stated no total. Counting the lines of the archived list gives roughly ninety entries. [1]
• The page bore the same dates as the June 2015 announcement, 5 to 9 October 2015, and the same Boston venue complex. [1][2]
• The announcement used the full name “13th Annual Cold Chain GDP & Temperature Management Logistics Global Forum” and described its speakers as drawn from regulators, associations and industry. [2]
• The announcement’s programme and speakers links both resolve to the same brochure request form on the former site. No separate archived speakers page was reachable from the release. [2]
• The snapshot is dated 9 September 2015, which is twenty-six days before the event opened. Any change to the list after that date is not recorded. [1]

What the listed titles show

The titles in the selection above fall into a few groups. Two entries are regulatory inspectors, one from Austria and one from the Netherlands, and one of them is also listed as chairman of a PIC/S GDP working group. Two entries come from standards or testing bodies as the page described them (a pharmacopeia expert committee and ISTA). One is a project lead for an air-transport pharma logistics certification program, and one is a deputy secretary general of a Chinese packaging association. Two entries are pharmaceutical company packaging or logistics managers. [1] This grouping describes the titles as printed. It does not say what any of these people discussed.

Source material and scope

What exists: one archived speaker page from a few weeks before the event, and one press release.

What is missing: the final speaker list, which speaker appeared in which session, biographies, and any list of speakers who withdrew or were added. A pre-event page may differ from who actually spoke. The roles shown are the ones listed in 2015 and may no longer be accurate. This page does not try to list everyone, and absence from it says nothing about whether a person took part. It does not present these people as a team, as authors or as advisers.

How this record connects to other archive pages

The speakers page was one of three public lists tied to the 2015 edition. The topics those speakers were expected to address are in the 2015 programme record, and the companies listed on the sibling page are in the 2015 sponsors and exhibitors record.

Later editions published speaker information in other forms. A ministry announcement and a brochure produced the Rita Karam speaker record for 2017, and the 2016 and 2017 agenda records give the speakers named in a 2016 release and a 2017 brochure. Public documents behind all of these are in the historical resource index, and every record is listed on the archive home.

Editorial analysis: why these topics still matter

The sources give names and titles only, so this analysis by the Editorial Desk says nothing about what any listed person presented or what any listed body requires.

The titles in the sample name several parts of the system that surround a pharmaceutical shipment: GDP inspection, pharmacopeia work on packaging and storage, a testing association, and an air-transport pharma logistics certification program. For a buyer today, those names are a reminder that a shipment passes through several rule sets before it reaches a patient. The guide on pharmaceutical packout walks from product storage and transport conditions through lane assessment to a packout procedure, and it says plainly that temperature limits come from product documentation.

A buyer who relies on packaging evidence meets the same bodies indirectly, because test methods and certifications often appear in supplier documents. The guide on reviewing a qualification report gives questions for checking what a report covers and what it states as its limits, and the guide on active versus passive shipping systems frames the packaging choice that such a report supports. Current requirements of any inspectorate, pharmacopeia, association or certification program should be taken from the body’s own current documents; a 2015 speaker list is no guide to them.

Editorial reconstruction note

This page was prepared by the Cold Chain Practice Editorial Desk from the public sources listed above. DeltaSpark and Cold Chain Practice are not affiliated with IQPC or the organizers of the former event. There is no registration and no current event. People and organizations named here are historical references and are not partners or endorsers of this site.