June 28, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Veristat, a clinical research organization (CRO) based in Southborough, Massachusetts, is opening an office in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina area. As part of those plans, it expects to hire 150 or more local people in the near future.
Veristat is a full-service CRO. The company is reporting strong growth, and also has offices in Southborough and Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Bruno, California, Montreal, Canada, and a European office in Glasgow, UK.
“Veristat has hired many talented clinical research professionals in North Carolina,” said Patrick Flanagan, Veristat’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “The Raleigh-Durham area has a population that includes a very experienced and professional CRO community. We have hired and will continue to hire very talented individuals to grow our team of biometrics and clinical operations professionals. Having a local office will facilitate the expansion of our team and allow us to better serve the clinical development needs of our clients.”
It indicates it is currently hiring for all business units, including Clinical Operations, Biometrics, Medical & Regulatory and SG&A. It also plans to accelerate the hiring when its office opens.
About six people are working remotely, but the company plans to hire 40 local people by the fall office opening. Although the lease hasn’t been finalized, it plans to have about 6,000 square feet in the Triangle area.
Veristat has shown 175 percent revenue growth from 2012 to 2015, with 2015 annual revenue of $28.3 million.
On May 2, Veristat announced that it was expanding its European operations by buying UK-based Spero Oncology. It specializes in clinical support for cancer clinical trials mostly in Europe, but also in Australia and New Zealand. As part of that acquisition, it will offer additional operational support in Europe, including feasibility studies, legal representation in the European Union, Clinical Monitoring, Project Management, Protocol Writing and Regulatory Strategy.
Spero’s founder and managing director, Theresa Bruce, was appointed vice president of Clinical Operations. Under this newly created position, Bruce will lead and develop strategy for the company’s global clinical operations team.
“Adding the Spero Oncology team to Veristat will strengthen our ability to deliver value to our clients’ multi-national trials throughout North America and Europe,” said Flanagan at the time in a statement. “The Spero team has an impressive reputation for delivering valuable guidance and insight to their clients’ clinical trials. We feel that this team is a great fit culturally and professionally and will enhance our ability to make a difference in the trials we perform on behalf of sponsors.”
A recent study by Industry Standard Research (ISR), which is also based in the Triangle area, CRO is expected to grow, and even escalate. The major CROs include Quintiles , PRA Health Sciences (PRAH), INC Research and Parexel .
Utilizing PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) data, ISR noted that since 2010, there were about 490 venture capital deals per year in the biopharma space. From 2010 to 2013, that averaged about $4.4 billion, but that increased to $6.3 billion and $7.4 billion in 2014 and 2015, respectively. And that will all have a ripple effect on the CRO industry, which ISR predicts will grow by an average of 6.6 percent over the next five years.
