TCNJ

30 The College of New Jersey Magazine W hen coverage of the pandemic took over the media in the spring of 2020, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson were the first companies to announce they were making a COVID-19 vaccine. Those names quickly became synonymous with what was hoped would allow us to live with some normality again. Visits with Grandma and Grandpa. Evenings out in our favorite restaurant. Even routine trips to the grocery store. The team at Pfizer, including senior director Frank DePierro, wondered why their company wasn't in the COVID-19 vaccine game, too. After all, Pfizer had a strong vaccine portfolio, brilliant scientists, and thanks to DePierro, a strong informatics team that he had built from nearly scratch in his 15 years with the pharmaceu- tical company (11 of which were in vaccine research and development). The world was waiting, and when the decision finally came down from management that Pfizer would begin development of a vaccine, it became top priority. "It went from nothing, to 'This needs to move really quickly,'" says DePierro. A lot of pressure was directed at the scientists and the labs, but as they worked, they turned to DePierro's team to provide informa- tion systems for the data and analytics to tell them if the science was sound. That urgency meant that DePierro had to rethink standard operations without sacrificing safety, quality, and science. In normal times, his team supports Pfizer studies with computa- tional systems and models that provide necessary data — data that regulators require and helps scientists to decide when to toss an idea, when to push it, and when to take that next step. But with COVID, the serial steps that would normally take place in the labs — for example, allowing sample processing, determining formulations or dosage, and how to analyze data — had to be thought through all at once. The science behind the vaccine couldn't be rushed or changed, so the time had to be made up in the collection and analyzation of the data. "My team programmed systems for all these various outcomes and performed statistical analysis of all these things in parallel," says DePierro. "We were starting to build systems when we didn't even know what was going to be needed yet," he says. Having the systems in place meant the scientists could receive and process hundreds of thousands of clinical samples, and move forward on ideas that showed promise. The quest became 24/7 for months on end. In late 2020, as the world learned that Pfizer had produced a vaccine to combat COVID-19, the excitement was building inside the walls of Pfizer's labs. But so were the nerves of DePierro and his team. Everyone knew that they finally had enough data to determine effectiveness. They just didn't know how effective the vaccine might prove to be. "No one The excitement was building inside the walls of Pfizer's labs. But so were the nerves of DePierro and his team. Frank DePierro '03 collects vaccine data at record speed.

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