Laurence Birch was named chairman of DataTrak as the struggling firm rearranged its management team. The post of COO has been eliminated. Recently, the firm’s quarterly loss expanded by 18 percent, to $2.2 million. Revenues dropped 41 percent to $2 million. Some of the reading of the financial statements is bleak. “If existing sales trends from the past seven months continue for the rest of 2008, even if we experience no significant unforeseen trial cancellations or delays, we do not believe we will have sufficient available funds in order to meet our longer-term working capital requirements for 2009, including the $3,000,000 balloon payment on the ClickFind notes due February 1, 2009,” the company said.

INC Research added new board members. David Gill, former CFO of NxStage Medical, will also serve as the chairman of INC Research’s audit committee. William Hall is co-founder and chairman of Procyon Technologies. He also currently serves as an adjunct professor at the Ross School of Business Administration and as a member of the Leadership Council of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. Here’s the release.

This event is designed for entrepreneurs, and has a few sessions on drug safety. The sponsor of the meeting is the Hamner Institute.

Veeda Oncology selected the TrialWorks clinical trial management solution from ClinPhone for sites in France, Germany and the U.S. Said Kathy Squillace, VP of global clinical operations at Veeda Oncology: “Because our sites are spread geographically, we needed a web-based system that was intuitive and easy to use, while still offering robust functionality. TrialWorks emerged as the leader for us in this regard.” Here’s the release.

Democrats in Congress are fretting about an expected Supreme Court decision to block most drug safety lawsuits. The industry’s critics are marshalling legal experts and others who note the FDA previously supported lawsuits against sponsors. In a Washington hearing, David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner, disputed the idea that the agency can effectively monitor drug safety. “The companies will always have better and more timely information on its products than the FDA will ever have,” he said. Here’s the story. (Medical device makers have already been exempted from safety litigation by the Supreme Court, as we wrote in this profile of David Lamb.)

EmergingMed is a website that hopes to help facilitate patient recruitment in oncology trials. It offers a personalized service that is free to patients and for which sponsors and CROs pay. Some physicians may view the one-on-one service as an effort to circumvent their relationships with patients; others may be grateful to hand off the task of helping patients find appropriate trials. The company was started in 2000, though it’s kept a low profile since then. In some ways EmergingMed also hopes to provide a better user interface to clinicaltrials.gov, which was designed by and for IT professionals. EmergingMed is partnering with Revolution Health, a vehicle of AOL founder Steve Case, who believes the internet and computers can improve health care.

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