We're heading to PHUSE EU Connect 2026

We’re heading to Glasgow for PHUSE EU Connect 2026, which runs from 15 to 18 November at the SEC (Scottish Event Campus). We’re looking forward to four days with the clinical data science community.

You’ll find us on stand 25 throughout the exhibition, and one of our team is giving a talk. Here’s who’s going and what we’d like to talk to you about.

Who you’ll meet

Esther Gillespie, our CEO. Esther is the person to talk to about longer-term plans, whether that's a multi-year move to open source or building up R and Python skills across a department.

Colin Gillespie, our CTO. If you have a technical question about R packages, infrastructure or migration, he's the person to find. Colin is also giving our talk.

Amieroh Abrahams, our Sales & Client Relationship Coordinator. Amieroh can talk you through how we work with clients, from training a single team to supporting a full platform rollout.

What we’ll be talking about

Moving from SAS to R

Most teams we speak to have moved past “should we use R?” and on to “how do we move without putting a submission at risk?” We help organisations plan that move: deciding what to migrate first, what can stay in SAS for now, and how to check that R and SAS outputs agree. If you’re weighing this up, our post on whether SAS is worth keeping is a good place to start.

R package validation

Using open source in a regulated setting means being able to show why you trust each package. Our Litmusverse tools help you risk assess R packages and produce the evidence your quality team needs. Our post on how Litmus scores R packages explains the approach, and the same thinking applies to validating Shiny apps. Come to the stand if you’d like to see how it works on your own package list.

R and Python platforms for regulated work

As a Posit Premier Partner, we install, configure and support Posit Workbench, Connect and Package Manager for teams that need controlled, reproducible environments. We’re happy to talk through what a validated setup looks like and where teams most often get stuck.

Training for clinical programmers and statisticians

We run R and Python training for pharma teams, from first steps for SAS programmers through to package development and Shiny. Courses can be tailored to your own data standards and workflows.

Navigating Package Updates at Scale: Using Diffify to Govern Open-Source R and Python Dependencies in Pharma

Colin Gillespie is presenting this talk at PHUSE EU Connect.

Most pharma teams pin their R and Python package versions, then move them forward in large jumps. Installing the new versions is quick. Working out what changed, across a few hundred packages, is the slow part. LLM coding assistants look like a shortcut, but they work from training data with a cut-off date and won’t always tell you when they don’t know about a release.

Colin’s talk shows how to give an assistant facts to work from instead. Diffify computes the differences between package versions for every CRAN package and the 5,000 most downloaded PyPI packages, with no LLM involved. The Diffify MCP server passes those diffs to an assistant, so it updates code against what changed rather than what it remembers. The result is a list of what needs fixing and, just as useful for sign-off, what’s safe to leave alone.

The Diffify MCP server is in beta this autumn. If you’d like to try it, come and find Colin.

Come and say hello

If you’re going to PHUSE EU Connect, stop by the stand for a chat. If you’d like to set aside time to talk about a specific project, get in touch before the conference and we’ll find a slot.

See you in Glasgow!