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Q&A

In your opinion, what is the greatest challenge in your field?

Reducing the costs, complexity and time currently needed to develop a new medicine, and therefore the price that many patients have to pay (or cannot pay) to use that medicine.

Where do you see your field going? What is your vision of the field in 2030?

Technology and molecular biology are converging to such an extent and at such speed that by 2030 it will be possible to predict and prevent diseases at the fetal stage and in real life; gene editing and highly specific targeted interventions applied at the cellular level before the disease is even expressed will make most drugs as we know them today unnecessary and irrelevant.

What advice would you give your younger self about to enter the “real world?”

Be open to considering the unexpected opportunity; don’t judge others by their appearance; give everyone respect and the benefit of the doubt; apologize with sincerity.

Imagine a day without work, the internet, and any other obligations. What would you do?

I cannot imagine it. I would get up early in the morning and hurry to get to my next volunteering gig – because someone there needs me to show up and do something.

How has DIA helped you?

DIA has been for me (and continues to be) a “parallel universe” that is fully aligned with my values, has complemented my regular job, has enriched my career, informed my perspectives, expanded my network, enhanced my learning, and fostered relationships with amazing people in our ecosystem. My life would be emptier without DIA.

What would you like to see DIA do for you in the future?

It’s more about what I can do for DIA in the future, because what we do for DIA as volunteers comes back to us multiplied severalfold. I want to contribute in some ways to promoting better health for patients, within and outside of DIA.

BIOGRAPHY

Alberto Grignolo, PhD, is a Corporate Vice President at Parexel, and established the firm's Japan Consulting Services during a two-year assignment in Tokyo. Dr. Grignolo has served as an adviser on human subject protection in clinical trials to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, on the first Executive Committee of the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, as Chairman of the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society, and as President of FIDIA Pharmaceutical Corporation. He is a DIA Fellow, Editor of DIA's digital magazine Global Forum, and serves on the faculty of DIA's Regulatory Affairs: The IND, NDA, and Post-Marketing training course, which he taught in Japan, China, Korea, Europe, and the US.