The diary firm says 10,000 people are now certified to use its platform. That’s a five-fold increase since the program was started. The company’s network of contract research organizations (CROs) is also growing, and now includes 8 of the top 10 CROs. A few partners include Dendrite International, VIASYS Healthcare…more...

A U.S.-Israeli firm, Business Events, claims to be able to perform data mining on all of a large company’s data. News accounts neglect to say how they load all of a large company’s data. But a story online is interesting because the principals behind Business Events got their start in…more...

Authorities in Canada are changing the rules for clinical trials. They’re taking a more proactive stance than colleagues in Britain, which saw 6 patients severely injured in a clinical trial earlier in 2006. (In the most serious case, one British patient lost his fingers and toes.) The Canadians have implemented…more...

Parexel International acquired the California Clinical Trials Medical Group for $65 million. Founded in 1981, California Clinical Trials Medical Group (CCTMG) has 180 employees and is based in Glendale, California, where one of four facilities has 16 exam rooms. The firm does research in trials from Phase I-IV. CCTMG says…more...

Earlier this week, the FDA heard two expert views on nanotechnology. The number of products the FDA has already approved using nanotechnology? Nine, including Abraxane, Acticoat and Estrasorb. The prepared remarks made at the FDA are online. The blog nanotechwire brought this to our attention and has an interesting story…more...

Clinical data management is not really an endangered species. But it is threatened. That’s because some companies believe that massive, traditional systems to manage clinical trial data could be made obsolete by electronic data capture (EDC) tools that do some of the same tasks. An Asian contract research organization (CRO)…more...

Just defining the life sciences can be controversial. For one Wall Street analyst, life sciences firms only help with drug discovery and do not participate in it themselves. Citigroup’s Elise Wang says the life sciences are finally poised for growth. Perhaps the cycle is turning again, with once-hot companies warming…more...

How electronic should the offices of regulatory agencies be? On the one hand, they’re accustomed to paper. They have no legal mandate to require electronic submissions, only the ability to gently encourage the industry to move toward electronic systems. The FDA is certainly doing that. But as the FDA’s own…more...

Animal rights activists in the Phoenix area had threatened to block a 300,000 square foot testing facility planned by Covance. The new facility was to employ 300-500 workers at first, and expand to 2,000. At the last minute, in a news conference with unusual security, Covance stunned the Arizona animal…more...

Generic drugs will now get the same FDA system that has been used to track applications for new drugs. The FDA system has a pretty exciting name, DFS, which stands for Division File System. It’s been used by CDER and its Office of New Drugs for six years. But the…more...