Innovation needed for biotechs

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle believes that Biotech is in need of innovation, and points to diagnostics testing and biofuel production as the next possible chance, as it takes many many years to develop blockbuster drugs. Innovation was possible before because of the fact that investors were willing to risk time and money to come up with the next blockbuster drug. Innovation is critical in these few fields. What do you think? Where will innovation and production in teh biotech industry go next?

Clinical trial shows hope for no more insulin injections

According to The Medical News, an Australian clinical trial will commence for the treatment of type I diabetes that will not require daily insulin injections. The trial will now move on to Auckland, New Zealand in Middlemore Hospital.

Prof. Bob Elliott, Founder of LCT and diabetes specialist, said: "We have great hopes for these trials. We already have two patients in the Russian trials that are now off insulin and we are planning to use much higher doses of our product Diabecell in these trials."

Find out more here.

New software for clinical trials

TranSenda has a new software that will help the efficiency of all clinical trails. It'll improve the ability to manage the clinical study.

Cortex will enable organizations to leverage the power of access to centralized operational data from all applications used across all clinical studies.

Read more about the software here.

Finding patients in Phase I clinical trials

At FiercePharma, they look at how to effectively recruit patients in a CRO's local area for Phase I clinical trials. They suggest joining your local community to spread awareness and developing new media outlets to spread the word but not over saturate the market. For more, read the article here.

Sigma-Alpha Moves Differently from Classic CROs Offerings

Last week, Tony Fong of Genomeweb reported that, Sigma-Aldrich, hoping to grab a bigger slice of the biopharma industry's expanding appetite for outsourcing, (last) week expanded its services business to include mass spectrometry-based protein characterization, protein expression, and protein purification.

The idea is not for Sigma-Aldrich to collaborate with biopharmas on large-scale projects and manage them; "that's what a classic CRO does, and this is definitely not a classic CRO offering." Rather, what the company is offering is the chance for customers to choose individual services from a menu without fear of jeopardizing their intellectual property, she said.

In fact, the executive of one CRO said that because of the limited offering of services by Sigma-Aldrich, the two are not competing for the same business.

Sigma-Aldrich Debuts New Protein Services to Meet Biopharma's Growing Outsourcing Trend

Meetings Drive Business

This is why companies need to continue to invest in business meetings. Not only will those who attend gain new and fresh perspectives from other attendees, but they'll hear from top companies who have lived by the same philosophy. Investment in yourself and innovation are the key to your business. What have you done recently to invest in your business?

Did you get a chance to attend Partnerships with CROs this year? What would you expect to gain from the experience?

Meetings Drive Business

Merck to cut jobs

According to the New York Times, the Merck merger with Schering-Plough will eliminate 16,000 jobs from the company. After the merger, the group will be the second largest Pharma company. Pfizer will remain the largest. Read the full story here.

How do you pay the participants in your clinical trials?

In an article at ClinPage recently, they look at how Greenphire is speeding up the process of paying those involved in the clinical trial process. They believe that by making payments available through prepaid cards which are also electronic payments, a lot of confusion can be saved as well as those trial participants involved who are underbanked have a way to receive payments. Read the full article here.

Women in cancer clinical trials

According to a news article at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, clinical trials dealing with cancer research aren't including enough women. Doctors may not be able to identify all of the gender differences that occur between women and men, as only 37% of trial participants are women. Read the full article here.

CROs 2009 Workshop Video

For those who missed the workshop last month in Orlando, we are providing unlimited access to this timely workshop to all Partnerships attendees and their colleagues. And since we understand your training and travel budgets are limited at this time, this video workshop is completely free of charge.

Simply click the link below to watch the video at your leisure, and feel free to pass along to your CRO colleagues.

www.iirusa.com/cropartners/BDWorkshop.xml

If you are in business/corporate development, sales, marketing, client relations, account management, operations or project management at a CRO or other outsourcing provider, this video workshop will help you achieve your professional development goals including:

• Demonstrate value to Sponsors who are increasingly pushed to make decisions based solely on cost
• Understand how downsizing in pharma will make micro-managing a thing of the past as CROs take over as the ‘doer’
• Access the right people (decision makers) in an organization to approach for new business opportunities -- and getting them to return your call
• And much more....

Outsourcing challenges

In a recent article at the National Post of Ontario, Canada, they look at the some of the risks that are associated with outsourcing clinical trials to other countries. A few of the roadbumps could be: different culture with different standards, the application quality between the two different populations, and the treatment of patients. There have been a surge of clinical trials being conducted in different countries, India, China and Argentina. Read the full article here.

How has your company overcome these challenges? What advice do you have to other companies outsourcing their clinical trials?

Novotech in Joint Venture with Indian CRO, Focuses on Asian Expansion

We invite you to download this complimentary report, "Novotech in Joint Venture with Indian CRO, Focuses on Asian Expansion."

Please feel free to add any comments to this post or continue the discussion on Twitter.


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