Things aren’t going so great for Wayne, Pa.-based contract research organization (CRO) Encorium Group (Nasdaq: ENCO). In April, its CFO/executive vice president/secretary/general counsel for the last four years got hired away by Southborough, Mass.-based CRO Averion International (OTCBB: AVRO). Lawrence Hoffman stepped down May 2, and an interim CFO, Philip…more...

Independent accreditation in the clinical research world had been slow to catch on, but now it suddenly appears to be a topic of high interest. Compliance with existing regulations is not enough, it seems. Just take the numbers. In its first seven years of accrediting those in clinical research, the…more...

Research on the spine is where cardiac research was 10 years ago, declares Marcy Rogers. And that’s why she’s working hard to establish a presence in what she considers a soon-to-boom field. Enter, then, San Diego-based SpineMark CRO Management, the industry’s sole spine-only contract research organization (CRO), launched in 2005…more...

Some industries simply move jobs to India. Simple. Done. In pharma, the situation is more complex. John Balian, senior VP of global pharmacovigilance and epidemiology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) told the huge 2008 “Partnerships With CROs” conference in Las Vegas this week that his company has also had a more…more...

What if patients were easy to find? What if you knew all their concommitant meds and it didn’t really matter? What if you could generate a quick-and-dirty answer to the number of people taking medicine X and having adverse event Y? Those were the extremely juicy questions at the heart…more...

Sponsors certainly have plenty of risk these days. For those that would prefer not to finance a compound through the early phase of its life cycle, there’s a contract research organization (CRO) willing to share the uncertainty and, should it materialize, the reward. Wilmington, N.C.-based PPD has a compound-partnering program…more...

On Sept. 30, 2004, the day Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market, Lancashire, England’s Synexus Clinical Research was working on the biggest Vioxx trial ever.  “I nearly jumped out my office window,” jokes CEO Michael Fort. The Vioxx saga turned out to be a blessing for the company, however. The…more...

Oncology? Limiting? Not in the least. That’s what Tom Ludlam says. He’s CEO of the Columbus, Ohio-based contract research organization (CRO) Prologue, which only conducts cancer trials. The company has more work than it can shake a stick at.  “There is certainly plenty of opportunity,” Ludlam says. That’s putting it…more...

To say that things at PRA International have been in flux of late would be an understatement.  Last September, the publicly traded contract research organization (CRO) moved its headquarters from Reston, Virginia, to Raleigh, North Carolina. Two months later, the three-decade-old company was bought by private equity firm Genstar Capital…more...

Little is known. But what’s there is tantalizing. Parexel International has offered to buy ClinPhone. ClinPhone has rebuffed the overture for now. Matters may go no farther. A merger of the two firms, now hypothetical, would change the conventional wisdom about how services and technologies should be combined in clinical…more...