First Consulting Group was acquired by Computer Sciences for $365 million. ClinPage wrote about FCG during the annual DIA conference this year. Here’s a news release about First Consulting’s approach to making Microsoft Office documents fit into the terrain of regulated companies.

Ergomed Group, a clinical trials services provider, will be locating its Middle East and India headquarters at the Dubai Biotechnology and Research Park (DuBiotech life sciences park). Ergomed is the first contract research organization (CRO) to establish a base at DuBiotech. Miroslav Reljanovic, CEO of the Ergomed Group, said: “We see this expansion as a strategic move, with the Middle East and India now emerging as truly attractive regions for biotechnology. As with our co-development business model, ERGOMED has once again become a pioneer in the geographic broadening of a rapidly changing industry.”

Clinical trial technology suite ClinPhone has been conducting a pricey restructuring after losing $3.5 million in H1 2007. While the company did grow revenues by 11.5 percent to $47.8 million in the six months to August 2007, administrative costs went up 35 percent to $29.7 million. Its customers were also purchasing ClinPhone electronic data capture (EDC) solutions as services, not licensed products, leading to the income being recognized in staged payments, rather than lump sums. Some top managers are taking a 13 percent salary cut for the remainder of the year to restore profitability.

IT firm Court Square Data Group and NextDocs Corp., are partnering to deliver document management solutions to the life sciences. Court Square will provide hosted-solutions and project management and integration services to NextDocs customers who use its 21 CFR Part 11 compliant document and quality management products. NextDocs CEO Zikria Syed, said: “We built this application atop the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform, ensuring compatibility with the most widely adopted business applications. In addition, we took full advantage of SharePoint’s ability to function as a web portal, enabling NextDocs customers to access and use our software throughout the distributed enterprise.”

Bio-Imaging Technologies, a health care contract service organization providing services in the design and management of the medical-imaging component of clinical trials, announced that its president and chief executive officer, Mark L. Weinstein, is scheduled to present at the SMH Capital Investor Growth Conference at 9:30 a.m. eastern standard time on November 8, 2007.

According to Richard Miller, CEO of Pharmacyclics, patients and researchers alike are advocating for better methods of conducting and evaluating clinical research in more efficient and relevant ways. For example, rather than the one-size-fits all FDA approach to drug approval, what is required is a context based approach to drug approval where the data, safety, availability of alternate therapies and other factors are considered together in context. In a recent JAMA article, statisticians Kent and Hayward wrote that “the results of clinical trials might not apply in a straightforward way to individual patients, even those within the trial.” What they mean is that, instead of having treatment decisions based on the average results of trials, it would be more helpful to determine how patients with specific characteristics had performed in a trial.

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