BURLINGTON, Mass., Sept. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- inVentiv Clinical Trial Recruitment Solutions (iCTRS), offering solutions to overcome the costly obstacles that delay clinical trials, announced today a strategic partnership with ViS Research to revolutionize and speed the antiquated system of clinical trial site evaluation.
Developing a drug can cost more than $1 billion, with a single clinical trial running more than $100 million. Proper planning is key to efficiently using R&D investment and avoiding delays in getting new medicines to market. Yet about 80% of clinical trials are delayed because of unfulfilled enrollment.[1] iCTRS has pulled apart and analyzed each obstacle in clinical trial planning to improve the process.
The partnership with ViS addresses the key problem of clinical trial site evaluation trial planners simply don’t have adequate analytics about research centers and locations where centers operate. Information is often inaccurate and outdated or simply does not exist. To find the right trial site, across more than 400,000 research centers worldwide, trial planners send out lengthy feasibility questionnaires, often on paper, that are frequently never filled out or returned. An estimated $10 billion a year is wasted because of poor site selection the failure to match trial planners with appropriate, effective research sites.
Through its partnership with ViS, iCTRS brings an interactive navigation system to this clinical research universe, so that trial planners can quickly match their needs with the disease-specific capabilities of individual research centers. They can quickly and efficiently evaluate all the relevant analytics such as local patient population, research activity, infrastructure, personnel, timelines from the country level through state, city, postal code, all the way down to what is inside the research center facilities.
“We are committed to accelerating clinical research through breakthrough innovation, and this partnership offers trial sponsors the fastest most sophisticated way of ensuring research sites are properly equipped, staffed and ready to be processed for rapid activation,” says Ramita Tandon, senior vice president and general manager for iCTRS. “We are looking forward to building on the remarkable platform and database that ViS already has created.”
ViS experts generate analytics relevant to the locations where centers operate, through sophisticated algorithms and semantic technologies. The resulting analytics are validated by local experts and integrated with crowd-sourced input from clinical research centers through ViS’ social network, where centers upload their disease-specific profiles. ViS’ collaborative analytics approach integrates large amounts of data to provide up-to-date analytics, while enabling research centers to securely and efficiently showcase their disease-specific capabilities to trial planners.
Under the partnership agreement, and building upon ViS research platform, iCTRS and ViS will co-develop advanced, proprietary features for the platform that include automation of the Confidential Disclosure Agreement workflow and final sign-off, and enhanced analytical capabilities to rapidly compare feasibility information between sites.
“The entire feasibility process has needed revamping, and in partnering with iCTRS we expand our ability to deliver greater efficiency to the industry through innovative technologies in analysis, visualization, and networking,” said Fabio Thiers, MD, PhD, ViS founder and CEO, a Harvard/MIT physician-scientist and pioneer in clinical research analytics. “We believe the use of these technologies could reduce waste in global clinical research by 10-15%.”
The ViS partnership is the latest in a series of innovative partnerships announced by iCTRS that include Medikly, PatientsLikeMe.com, and Mytrus, Inc., in which inVentiv Health holds an equity stake all designed to get much-needed medicines to market faster and more cost efficiently.
About inVentiv Health
inVentiv Health, Inc. is a leading global provider of best-in-class clinical, commercial and consulting services to the life sciences industry. inVentiv offers convergent services that accelerate the performance of companies working to improve human life. In 40 countries around the world, inVentiv’s 12,000 employees work with more than 550 pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies, as well as companies that see health as a central part of their mission. inVentiv Health, Inc. is privately owned by inVentiv Group Holdings, Inc., an organization sponsored by affiliates of Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P., Liberty Lane Partners and members of the inVentiv management team. inVentiv Health helps clients transform promising ideas into commercial reality. For more information, visit http://www.inVentivHealth.com.
About ViS Research (ViS)
The ViS online feasibility platform is the first that allows trial planners to use interactive visualizations to navigate the intricate, disease-specific decision matrix to immediately gather feasibility information from 400,000+ disease-specific research sites and 320,000+ investigators. ViS helps these investigative sites by decreasing their administrative burden related to feasibility questionnaires, while enabling them to efficiently display their disease-specific capabilities, at no cost. The end result is that optimal decisions can be reached using a small fraction of the time and cost incurred through conventional methods. The ViS Research Institute was created as a global enterprise in 2010, with trial planning experts in four continents. More information at http://www.visresearch.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks that may cause our performance to differ materially. These forward-looking statements reflect our current views about future events and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. We wish to caution readers that certain important factors may have affected and could in the future affect our actual results and could cause actual results to differ significantly from those expressed in any forward-looking statement. Such factors include, without limitation: the impact of our substantial level of indebtedness on our ability to generate sufficient cash to fulfill our obligations under our existing debt instruments or our ability to incur additional indebtedness; the impact of customer project delays and cancellations and our ability to sufficiently increase our revenues and manage expenses and capital expenditures to permit us to fund our operations; the impact of the consummation of any future acquisitions; the impact of any change in our ratings and the ratings of our debt securities on our relationships with customers, vendors and other third parties; the impact of any additional leverage we may incur on our ratings and the ratings of our debt securities; our ability to continue to comply with the covenants and terms of our senior secured credit facilities and to access sufficient capital under our credit agreement or from other sources of debt or equity financing to fund our operations; the impact of any default by any of our credit providers; our ability to accurately forecast costs to be incurred in providing services under fixed price contracts; our ability to accurately forecast insurance claims within our self- insured programs; the potential impact of pricing pressures on pharmaceutical manufacturers from healthcare reform initiatives or from changes in the reimbursement policies of third-party payers; our ability to grow our existing client relationships, obtain new clients and cross-sell our services; the potential impact of financial, economic, political and other risks, including interest rate and exchange rate risks, related to conducting business internationally; our ability to successfully operate new lines of business; our ability to manage our infrastructure and resources to support our growth; our ability to successfully identify new businesses to acquire, conclude acquisition negotiations and integrate the acquired businesses into our operation, and achieve the resulting synergies; the resolution of purchase price adjustment disputes in connection with our recent acquisitions and related impacts; any disruptions, impairments, or malfunctions affecting software as well as excessive costs or delays that may adversely impact our continued investment in and development of software; the potential impact of government regulation on us and on our client base; our ability to comply with all applicable laws as well as our ability to successfully adapt to any changes in applicable laws on a timely and cost effective basis; our ability to recruit, motivate and retain qualified personnel, including sales representatives; the possibility that client agreements will be terminated or not renewed; any potential impairment of goodwill or intangible assets; consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry; changes in trends in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries or in pharmaceutical outsourcing, including initiatives by our clients to perform services we offer internally; our ability to convert backlog into revenue; the potential liability associated with injury to clinical trial participants; the actual impact of the adoption of certain accounting standards; and our ability to maintain technological advantages in a variety of functional areas, including sales force automation, electronic claims surveillance and patient compliance. Holders of our debt instruments are referred to reports provided to investors from time to time and the offering memoranda provided in connection with the issuance of our notes for further discussion of these risks and other factors.
[1] Lamberti, “State of Clinical Trials Industry”, 292; http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html
SOURCE inVentiv Health, Inc.
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