Contract research news in brief
pharmafile | July 20, 2011 | News story | Research and Development |Â Â research and development newsÂ
M&A abounds in the CRO sector with INC completing its purchase of Kendle, inVentiv snappig up Pharmanet and ICON buying Firecrest, plus new contracts for OpenClinica and Clinilabs.
INC Research completed its takeover of fellow contract research organisation Kendle in a $232 million deal that was first announced in May. The companies say the merger has created a global CRO with 5,000 employees operating in 100 countries and will rank among the top-tier CROs in terms of size and scale. The will help the firm compete for large-scale, global trial contracts, a market which is currently dominated by the likes of Covance and Quintiles. The combined firm is called INC Research and work has begun to integrate “customers, employees and services”, it said.
ICON has bought fellow Irish firm Firecrest Clinical, a company which has developed a web-based clinical trial management system (CTMS) used to improve compliance, consistency and execution of activities at investigative sites. The platform is used by nine of the top 10 pharma companies and has been proven to “drive efficiencies and improve study timelines”, commented ICO chief executive Peter Gray.
inVentiv Health has completed its acquisition of PharmaNet Development Group, creating a combined company with sales of around $2 billion a year, around $900 million of which will comes from contract research services. The merged firm has around 13,000 employees, including 6,000 in its clinical operations which focus on bioanalytical studies and phase I to IV trials. Financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
An open-source electronic data capture (EDC) system known as OpenClinica will be used in a new 36 million-euro project designed to detect drug-induced injury and funded by Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) Programme. The SAFE-T consortium was set up in 2009 by companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly and Amgen, and is trying to qualify biomarkers for drug-induced kidney, liver and vascular injury to enable quicker and safer evaluations of potential new medications. OpenClinica will support clinical trials in several sites in Europe and Israel over the next three years.
Clinilabs has won a contract to conduct a clinical research study on the effects of an unidentified investigational drug on the sleep of healthy volunteers. This study uses an experimental model to assess the effects of an investigational medication on night-time sleep and morning alertness. The US CRO’s CEO Gary Zammit said the use of experimental models and biomarkers are increasingly important in early-phase drug development.
Phil Taylor
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