Integrated Clinical Trial Services (ICTS) is offering a white paper on optimizing clinical sites.

A British newspaper alleges there are serious neurological adverse events associated with GSK's new cervical cancer vaccine. The story provides no statistics on the proportion of complications that have been serious, but says more than 2,100 adverse events have been reported to European authorities.

The world's top research center for vascular disease is in—Stanford? Manhattan? Bethesda? No, Petosky, Michigan. That's the latest word from this newspaper article, which includes a positive portrayal of clinical trials. The Cardiac and Vascular Research Center of Northern Michigan appears to have participated in more than two dozen completed or ongoing projects.

Later this week, there's a virtual conference called the ClinXpo. There will be virtual speakers and exhibit booths. "Visitors may request to interact with live booth staff, or simply download brochures, white papers and demos," according to the organizer, ExL Pharma. As best we can tell, it's free for people working in the sponsor community and $295 for everyone else. Here's a link.

Business Week magazine reports that a few global companies are starting to develop large IT projects on databases other than Oracle. Some Oracle customers are said to believe that the database firm has an arrogant corporate culture or exorbitant pricing. Also under scrutiny: Oracle's practice of auditing customers and assessing additional fees that are not easy to anticipate. Among the database alternatives: PostGRE and Ingres.

Quintiles will partner with the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The effort is part of a new Prime Site initiative at the contract research organization. "Prime Sites are large clinical institutions that collaborate with Quintiles to enhance their infrastructure for conducting clinical trials," said Christopher Cabell, head of global access to patients. "Through this new partnership, Quintiles will be able to significantly improve its ability to access patients and investigators who are critical to facilitating the increasingly complex therapies under development." Here's the release.

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