Contract research news in brief
pharmafile | October 27, 2010 | News story | Research and Development |Â Â Almac, Kinaxo, MediData Solutions, Quintiles, Ricerca Biosciences, Southern Research Institute, Venn Life Sciences, biofocus, contract researchÂ
Our latest crop of contract research news includes updates from Quintiles, Venn Life Sciences, Medidata Solutions, Southern Research Institute, Ricerca Biosciences, Almac, BioFocus and Kinaxo.
International contract research organisation (CRO) Quintiles has officially opened its Global IT service operations centre in Bangalore, India. The new unit is the first of its kind in the CRO industry and will monitor and manage “the comprehensive array of IT systems in the Quintiles cloud”, according to Naz Haji, senior vice president at Quintiles IT.
Ireland-headquartered CRO Venn Life Sciences has acquired DCI France, a Paris-based firm which offers clinical trial management services for phase I-IV trials and contract placement solutions for clinical research projects. The latest acquisition comes shortly after Venn bought Dutch CRO UpToYou. “We are constantly seeking to improve what we offer to our sponsors both in geographic reach and scale of services,” said Venn’s chief executive Tony Richardson.
The US National Cancer Institute has signed a 10-year, $24 million deal with eClinical company Medidata Solutions that will see the NCI make the company’s Rave electronic data capture (EDC) platform available to affiliated cancer centres.
US CRO Southern Research Institute has acquired a bioanalytics laboratory in Birmingham, Alabama, from BioCryst Pharmaceuticals thanks to the latter’s decision to realign its business and eliminate eight internal research positions. SRI takes over responsibility for the personnel and the lab, and will provide bioanalytical support to BioCryst on an outsourced basis.
Preclinical CRO Ricerca Biosciences has appointed William DeMaio as senior director of its drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) department. Prior to joining Ricerca, Dr DeMaio was associate director of biotransformation at Wyeth Research (now Pfizer).
Northern Ireland’s Almac said it successfully passed a four-day inspection of its Clinical Services UK facility, located in Craigavon, by the MHRA last month.
BioFocus has signed a one-year extension to its collaboration with Italian drugmaker Chiesi Farmaceutici, hiking the value of the contract to around 2.5 million euros. Under the terms of the extended collaboration agreement, BioFocus will provide medicinal chemistry and biology services, with an additional option for ADME services, for an undisclosed Chiesi therapeutic programme.
Bristol-Myers Squibb says it has selected Kinaxo Biotechnologies to support a number of its drug discovery programmes through the use of its chemical proteomics technologies to investigate the molecular targets of compounds in BMS’ pipeline.
Phil Taylor
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