Deloitte, the accounting and consulting giant, is getting into the drug safety game. Adding to its existing life sciences consulting group, the company has bought Intrasphere Technologies, which provides drug safety and regulatory services.
A key asset in the buyout is Intrasphere's PharmaCM, which is content-management software that is intended to help developers register clinical trial data on government-mandated registries. Deloitte plans to make the software part of its managed analytics business. And Bill Karl, Intrasphere's co-founder and former CEO, is joining Deloitte Consulting as a director. Financial terms of the buyout deal weren't disclosed.
Intrasphere, which has headquarters in Jersey City, NJ, and its European base in London, gives Deloitte a stake in areas of much concern to drug developers--the safety of products and the complex and often unforgiving regulatory environment. Before and after drugs are approved, life sciences companies have to manage lots of regulatory information and safety data. And that's where Intrasphere's services and technology appear to come in. Deloitte said that Intrasphere "provides professional services to help life sciences companies improve product safety, signal intelligence, pharmacovigilance and regulatory information management capabilities."
"The growing impact of health information technology and social media, greater complexity of therapeutic offerings in the marketplace, and an increasingly complex and stringent regulatory environment, in particular, have created an impetus for more proactive product safety and regulatory support services," said Dan Ressler, head of Deloitte's R&D informatics in life sciences practice, who will lead the new drug safety and regulatory group.
- here's Deloitte's release