Covance allowed a tour of a controversial Arizona lab for animal testing. “We always anticipate that there will be protests,” said Camilla Strongin, a spokeswoman for Covance’s public relations and lobbying firm, the Symington Group, chaired by former state governor Fife Symington. Here’s the story.

NovaRx selected two elements of the eCTD publishing package of Image Solutions, including ISIWriter and eCTDXPress. Said Paul Chung, executive VP of global software and service operations for ISI: “Sophisticated organizations like NovaRx know that in order to bring the next lung cancer drug to the people who need it, they need to make sure they are compliant with an ever-changing, and increasingly global, regulatory landscape.” Here’s the release.

There is a new contract research organization in Jordan. The Philadelphia Biological and Medical Product Development Center is being run by a group of U.S. investors. It’s being described as a turn-key, full service facility. “The time is now ripe for the medical industry in the region to achieve recognition from the global marketplace, and Jordan stacks up as the perfect host,” said Peggy Farley, managing director and co-founder of the Ascent Medical Technology funds. This article is a bit short on additional details.

A politician from a state with a minimal pharmaceutical industry presence harshly criticized the FDA. “Our citizens can no longer trust that their food, drugs or medical devices are safe when the FDA says they are,” said Michigan representative John Dingell. FDA head Andrew von Eschenbach had been called before Congress to give the politicians an opportunity for media exposure; Dingell criticized him for not requesting more money.

Medidata Solutions’ “Designer” product, a protocol authoring tool that we wrote about last week, has won the “Best In Show” award in the clinical trials and research category at the Bio-IT World meeting in Boston. Said Stephen Fogelson, president of Develotron, one of the judges for the awards. “While we received and reviewed a number of impressive submissions, Medidata Designer stood out from the rest due to its ability to bring significant value to clinical researchers by eliminating inconsistency errors and improving the overall quality of clinical protocols.”

United BioSource bought Envision Pharma for an undisclosed sum that one financial blog estimates at $3.8 million. Envision is a British firm specializing in software and services for scientific publication and communication. UBC CEO Ethan Leder said: “Given the increasing demand of regulators and public opinion for transparency in research, Envision’s contribution to the production of objective, scientifically driven medical publications is a cornerstone of our evidence-based credo and highly valuable to the entire medical community.”

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