Nextrials hired replacements for two key executives. Anthony Costello and Robert Lyons left the California electronic data capture (EDC) firm earlier this year. Now Robert Barr is coming in as chief technology officer; he is a former VP of software engineering for ClinPhone, which has just been acquired by Parexel. In a new position, Michelle Dockhorn will be vice president of global sales and marketing. “Nextrials is fortunate to be able to tap the experience of two industry veterans for its executive team,” said James Rogers, CEO and co-founder of Nextrials. Here’s a release. This describes Nextrials executives speaking at next week’s Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM) conference.

Quintiles has been named one of the 100 top places to work in Brazil. It was highly rated for promoting women, promoting young workers, hiring large numbers of highly educated workers, and hiring large numbers of people in general.

Exhibiting at this week’s annual Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) meeting, Pilgrim Software announced a partnership with Virtify. The two companies will jointly offer electronic regulatory submissions solutions for end-to-end management of the process. They’ll offer all the elements needed for eCTD or non-eCTD electronic submissions (NEES), and help organizations prepare for global mandates by regulatory agencies. “Pilgrim recognized the growing complexities of the regulatory submissions process, particularly today when many companies are still using manual, paper-based processes even though the era of mandatory electronic filing is upon us,” said Nikki Willett, VP of marketing and regulatory affairs at Pilgrim Software. Here’s the release.

This article summarizes some of the controversies around industry payments to doctors for various marketing or consulting services. Some people call such physicians key opinion leaders (KOL). We don’t know the website and can’t vouch for its content. It may have been inspired by this story from an Arizona newspaper.

Acurian said that half of all U.S. diabetics are in its patient database. That works out to eight million patients with Type 2 diabetes. Protocols in the therapeutic area are getting more complex, Acurian says. “Compared to just a few years ago, the diabetes protocols we see today are not garden variety,” said CEO Rick Malcolm. “Trial sponsors are aggressively competing for treatment-naive, metformin-only, or diabetics with specific co-morbidities such as obesity. It’s no longer just an issue of finding a diabetic in a certain HbA1c range.” We recently wrote about the company. This is a news release.

Pfizer launched a page on its website devoted to raising public awareness about drug safety. It’s a well-intentioned effort to dive into informing a scientifically illiterate public. “We want to increase understanding of the industry’s system for ensuring medicine safety,” said Joseph Feczko, Pfizer’s chief medical officer. One lingering question: Will the page really help the public understand drug safety better? Our guess is that the Madison-Avenue look may be too slick to win over large numbers of cynical or distrustful members of the public.

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