OmniComm, a provider of electronic data capture (EDC), announced quarterly financial results. Without releasing specific revenue or profit numbers, the company said new contract awards were up 162 percent.

Graham Nicholls will join Almac as director of biostatistics. After a career at GSK and Parexel, he’ll be working in the firm’s clinical technology division. “Graham brings considerable experience in adaptive trial designs, covariate adaptive (dynamic) randomization techniques, and other complex trial designs,” the release states.

Bio-Optronics has updated its clinical trial management system (CTMS). The new version was refined for contract research organizations and site management organizations “to facilitate patient recruitment, study execution, regulatory compliance, financial management and communication across clinical research entities,” the release states.

U.S. politicians are wading into a scientific debate over Avandia, GSK's diabetes blockbuster. Washington is trying to nudge regulators to halt a post-marketing study. One issue is the informed consent paperwork in the project. If the study is halted, it could affect whether the diabetes blockbuster remains on the market. The Wall Street Journal broke the story and unearthed this letter from the FDA to a top farm-state lawmaker.

Charles River will make a major purchase in China, buying WuXi AppTec for $1.6 billion. WuXi has approximately 4,000 employees and specializes in central lab and manufacturing services.

In the deal of the decade, Oracle bought Phase Forward for $685 million. The transaction is presumably under antitrust review. The purchase instantly raises Oracle’s life science profile in three key areas—electronic data capture, drug safety and randomization—after years of also-ran status. Phase Forward didn't invent EDC, but the firm did figure out how to deliver an uproven technology to a skeptical market. Phase Forward proved that EDC could be both a) profitable and b) heavily customized to the exacting specifications of big pharma. Phase Forward was able to sign large, prominent customers like GSK and Lilly to long-term contracts that gave the firm an aura of invincibility. The purchase is a tacit acknowledgment that Oracle’s own EDC product, developed with and for Pfizer, had never attracted any other admirers, even though the software was often given away. Oracle is not replying to media requests for interviews; Phase Forward canceled its usual quarterly call with Wall Street analysts. The deal is a win for Phase Forward investors, but there may be cultural issues in integrating the two firms that Oracle has not previously encountered. This January, 2009 ClinPage story is a rare case of Oracle articulating its strategy; in that story, a life sciences executive vowed that her newly reorganized business unit would grab the top position in the eclinical industry.

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