In a collegial industry, all clinical trial suppliers must work intimately with rivals. No matter how large or small a competitor may be, professionalism requires putting aside emotions of wariness or distrust. It's hard enough to get the science right, obey the law and finish the study. But tensions between large and small firms are rising in…more...

Not all that long ago, shippers of drug supplies for clinical trials were content to know: Did our drug ship? Then they wanted to learn: Did our supplies get stuck in Ukrainian customs—or at the depot? Now Almac Clinical Services is offering another level of detail, allowing sponsors to hop online to learn How long did DHL…more...

Our friends at the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) are running a survey about standards adoption in the pharmaceutical industry. The survey will only be open for additional input for a few more days. The standards body is also announcing several new training sessions in California and Europe. Omnicomm Systems, a provider of electronic data capture…more...

We asked Quintiles to tell us about one of the most improved sites or site networks in its five-year-old partner sites program. The contract research organization (CRO) introduced us to Piedmont Medical Research, a group of 11 sites in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The network is based in Winston-Salem, N.C. It's comprised of nine sites…more...

Kendle launched a new system for biostatistics. According to the news release, the platform is based on SAS and will be used by a growing team of Kendle personnel in India. "Data will be processed at the server level much faster than ever before, greatly improving the productivity of our teams around the world and expediting the…more...

We've always thought of clinical data managers as members of what amounted to a quasi-religious order, like the Franciscans. Data managers serve as scientific priests, guiding wayward medical information back into the light, anointing and condemning clinical computer systems as appropriate. Then we got on the phone with Nagaraja Srivatsan, VP of the life science practice at…more...

If the International Alliance of Patients Organizations (IAPO) gets its way, patients will soon sit at the table with scientists to offer input into the design of study protocols. Not in a forceful or adversarial way, says Jeremiah Mwangi, IAPO's senior policy officer, but in a way that benefits everyone. Picture, for example, a pediatric epilepsy trial…more...