The HD View with Dr. Lorna Speid

We are very pleased to have Dr. Speid with us tonight. Lorna Speid, PhD, is a pharmacist. She works in the pharmaceutical industry as a regulatory affairs and drug development consultant. She has a practice in the development of new treatments for rare diseases.

After working for Sanofi Winthrop in the United Kingdom, Ciba Geigy at headquarters in Switzerland, and Novartis in Switzerland, she moved to the United States. She worked for three small companies in the United States, and now runs her own consulting practice. Dr. Speid sat on an important NIH Committee for the development of new treatments for rare diseases. She is the founder of a non-profit called Rare Diseases Patients First!  This organization is planning to provide education to patients around the world that have a rare disease, about the clinical trial process. This will be done free of charge.  We will provide more information about these educational internet-based meetings, as soon as they are ready to be rolled out later this year. Dr. Speid advises on the development of new treatments for rare diseases.

Dr. Speid saw a need to provide information to patients about clinical trials that would allow them to be empowered enough to ask the right questions before entering clinical trials, and while in clinical trials. She wrote the book Clinical Trials: What Patients and Healthy Volunteers Need to Know, to accomplish this.  It was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.