Contract research news in brief
pharmafile | June 30, 2010 | News story | Research and Development |Â Â CROÂ
Yet more geographic expansion from leading CROs, with Kendle opening an office in India and PRA International announcing a Hungarian phase I unit, plus news from Phase Forward, BBK Worldwide and RPS.
Contract research organisation Kendle has bolstered its presence in the Indian clinical research sector by opening a new operations centre in Gujarat province that will initially employ around 50 staff and could see numbers rise to 300 or more. The unit is located in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar Knowledge Corridor, an area which is close to a number of Indian universities. The Indian CRO market is growing at around 49% a year, according to data from IMS Health.
PRA International has opened an eight-bed phase I clinical research facility in Budapest, Hungary, to provide early-stage drug development trials in patients. The US-based CRO said the new unit follows the same ‘unit-on-demand’ model, which involves setting up a facility within a medical facility that specialises in the treatment of a target patient population. For example, it also operates an eight-bed unit within a nephrology clinical in the Czech Republic.
Shareholders in eClinical software specialist Phase Forward have given their support to the firm’s proposed merger with Oracle Corp. Oracle made a $685 million cash offer for Phase Forward in April, the latest in a series of mergers and acquisitions to build its position in the healthcare sector. Later that month legal action by a group of shareholders resisting the merger threatened to derail the transaction, but that action was dismissed by a US court in May.
Patient recruitment specialist BBK Worldwide has launched a new application designed for use on Apple’s new iPad device that facilitates the “myriad processes necessary to effectively recruit and manage patients for global clinical trials”. The iPad tool is part of a recently-introduced patient recruitment franchise programme at BBK.
US company ReSearch Pharmaceutical Services is hoping to raise $100 million via an initial pubic offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq. The clinical outsourcing specialist has been financially buoyant of late, posting a 28% hike in first quarter 2010 revenues to $58 million while operating profits climbed more than 50%. The company’s growth has come on the back of a series of acquisitions of CROs in Europe and China in 2008/09.
Phil Taylor
Related Content
Crown Bioscience opens new US model development centre
Crown Bioscience, a US global contract research organisation (CRO) that is part of JSR Life …
From molecule to market and beyond: Uniphar announces extended global commercialization platform
22 October 2024 – Dublin, Ireland – Healthcare services business, Uniphar, has developed its full-service …
Drug development contracts: can lessons be learned from healthcare delivery?
There is a very good question to ask at the beginning of every project: “What …
