What are appropriate turnaround times as images pass through the different stages of a clinical trial? Is the pharmaceutical industry applying outmoded thinking? Here's the context for such questions. A few weeks back, we ran an article on benchmarks in imaging. In brief, Perceptive Informatics, a division of Parexel, had adopted some standards in consultation with a…more...

Last Friday, we wrote up the recent Drug Information Association (DIA) presentation by Quintiles VP of global data solutions, Thomas Grundstrom. But the ground rules of the DIA meeting bar speakers from self-promotion or advancing the messages of their employers. That left us with a few unanswered questions. Grundstrom was happy to address those in a conversation…more...

Earlier this month, we ran a two-part series about electronic data from the perspective of clinical sites. (The stories can be found here and here.) The frustration at sites is real. It’s deep. Given that industry urgently needs both EDC and clinical sites, the distress is likely to continue. None of the design constraints—on sponsors or on…more...

The conventional wisdom is that a contract research organization (CRO) can't grow significantly it if it only works in the U.S. A global presence is obligatory for companies of a certain size. But not every CRO can afford to acquire other firms, especially in this economy. Which is why some diminutive, geographically disparate CROs are banding together.…more...

One of the more obscure—and intriguing—eclinical suites has just been sold by an Indian firm, Megasoft, to a U.S. computer consultancy. Trianz bought Afferenz, where Venkatesan Thangaraj has been president and one of the key strategists for some time. He's an ebullient, unusually cheerful executive. Thangaraj notes that in a less than glorious economy, his sales have…more...

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie care about drug development? They suddenly hunger to learn more about sponsor-CRO partnerships, PDUFA and Critical Path, and thus they showed up at the Drug Information Association's (DIA) 45th annual meeting to drink it all in? They are curious about science in addition to being gorgeous, rich and fertile? Wait—those were actually…more...

Most ClinPage readers have been to a conference where someone stands up and says, "Back in 1985, my company was doing some interesting things with computer punch cards. It was very close to what electronic data capture (EDC) became. We decided to unplug our system after a few years, but it worked well—better, in some ways, than…more...

“Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Winston Churchill wrote to a friend. The year: 1941. World War II was just getting started. In 2009, thousands of web-based programs are sweeping over the entertainment, financial, and publishing industries. Do today’s clinical trial professionals have the tools to finish the job? Do they like the…more...