Clinical Trials Firm ICON to Create 200 New Jobs

Clinical Trials Firm ICON to Create 200 New Jobs
January 29, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

DUBLIN – On Thursday ICON plc , a provider of outsourced clinical trial services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, announced plans to build a new global innovation hub in Ireland, which is expected to create 200 new jobs.

The new hub will drive development of new technologies and clinical trial processes that “will enable faster access to large volumes of clinical data and will enable clinical trial personnel to derive better insights from the data,” the company announced today in a press release.

The new roles are expected to include positions in information technology, data analytics, clinical science, project management, finance and human resources. The new positions, split between Dublin and Limerick, will increase the number of the company’s Irish employees to approximately 1,200. ICON has approximately 10,700 employees, operating from 83 locations in 38 countries.

Ciaran Murray, ICON CEO, stressed the importance of innovations in clinical trials and said the company’s new hub would play a role as one of the leading research and development centers in the world.

The new global hub was financed, in part, through a jobs initiative sponsored by the Irish government. ICON, which was founded in Dublin in 1990, specializes in the strategic development, management and analysis of programs that support clinical development--from compound selection to Phase I-IV clinical studies.

In 1998 ICON became a public company trading on NASDAQ. Since 2000 the company has acquired a number of healthcare and life science companies, including last year’s acquisition of Virginia-based Aptiv Solutions, which designs and implements clinical and medical device trials for the pharmaceutical industry.

In November 2014 the U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture selected ICON to develop an industry-standard Patient Reported Outcome measure that can be used in anti-bacterial drug development trials for hospital-acquired bacterial pneumonia (HABP). HABP is the second most common hospital-acquired infection and is the primary cause of death in intensive care units.

The project involves creating a HABP PRO instrument with established content validity in accordance with the FDA Drug Development Tool qualification process. The new PRO would assess the symptoms of HABP at various time points over the course of the infection.

ICON also earned recognition in September 2014 when Cynthia Dukes, vice president of vaccines, infectious disease and women’s health & primary care, was voted one of the 50 Most Influential People following a global industry survey conducted by VaccineNation.

In April 2014, ICON was awarded the Best CRO (contract research organization) in the Vaccine Industry Excellence Awards. ICON won the award based range of services provided in niche and core therapeutic areas, methods of performance improvement and quality of relationships with clients.


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