While it supports a cottage industry of professionals, manually pushing piles of clinical trial data along from one system to the next isn't necessarily the most efficient way of doing things. The same company may map data for the same drug in different ways in different trials—or miss errors in one trial's data set that were fixed…more...

Karen Hultberg was frustrated. The administrator of the New York Hospital Queens' Lang Research Center was trying to do more studies. But there was a big obstacle: for each research subject's check, she had make a separate request to the hospital's finance department. Each check—typically for $25 or $50—took one to three months to obtain and mail.…more...

One notable aspect of media coverage of clinical trials is the ready acceptance of the cost of a particular clinical research program. In every notable publication, as far as we can tell, the cost of a trial or a research program is confidently said to be so many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The amount…more...

One man's middle of nowhere is another man's perfectly situated. That's the way Paul Bishop and Lyle Camblos see Staunton, the small Virginia town that's home to their contract research organization (CRO), Atlantic Research Group (ARG). “It's equidistant from Rockville and RTP,” says Camblos, speaking of the myriad biotech companies along the I-270 corridor in Rockville, Md.,…more...

Even in 2009, in a context of clinical trials, "management" can mean just about anything. It may mean ... Karen, three cubicles away. Or a 5-year-old spreadsheet. Or a system that cost millions but sits unused. As a result, it's fair to say that clinical trial management systems (CTMS) do not enjoy a reputation for easy implementation,…more...

Want to get depressed? The Tufts Center For the Study of Drug Development has analyzed the length of clinical trials during two time periods: 1999-2002 and 2003-2006. The median number of days from first to last patient visit has doubled, to 598. Nineteen months. Can anyone think of any industry that takes twice as long to do…more...

For the contract research organization (CRO) serving multiple clients, it can be tough to stay abreast of multiple projects all over the world. In many ways, the technology advances of the past few years have made this more onerous, not less. The sheer number of systems with vital data continues to grow. Veeda Oncology is hoping to…more...

We were looking around for how many USB, or “thumb” drives are sold every year. Alas, we could locate no statistics. We canUSB…more...