BURLINGTON, Mass. – inVentiv Clinical Trial Recruitment Solutions (iCTRS), offering solutions to overcome the costly obstacles that delay clinical trials, announced today a strategic partnership with ViS Research to revolutionize and speed the antiquated system of clinical trial site evaluation.
Developing a drug can cost more than $1 billion, with a single clinical trial running more than $100 million. Proper planning is key to efficiently using R&D investment and avoiding delays in getting new medicines to market. Yet about 80% of clinical trials are delayed because of unfulfilled enrollment.1 iCTRS has pulled apart and analyzed each obstacle in clinical trial planning to improve the process.
The partnership with ViS addresses the key problem of clinical trial site evaluation – trial planners simply don't have adequate analytics about research centers and locations where centers operate. Information is often inaccurate and outdated – or simply does not exist. To find the right trial site, across more than 400,000 research centers worldwide, trial planners send out lengthy feasibility questionnaires, often on paper, that are frequently never filled out or returned. An estimated $10 billion a year is wasted because of poor site selection – the failure to match trial planners with appropriate, effective research sites.
Through its partnership with ViS, iCTRS brings an interactive navigation system to this clinical research universe, so that trial planners can quickly match their needs with the disease-specific capabilities of individual research centers. They can quickly and efficiently evaluate all the relevant analytics – such as local patient population, research activity, infrastructure, personnel, timelines – from the country level through state, city, postal code, all the way down to what is inside the research center facilities.
"We are committed to accelerating clinical research through breakthrough innovation, and this partnership offers trial sponsors the fastest most sophisticated way of ensuring research sites are properly equipped, staffed and ready to be processed for rapid activation," says Ramita Tandon, senior vice president and general manager for iCTRS. "We are looking forward to building on the remarkable platform and database that ViS already has created."
ViS experts generate analytics relevant to the locations where centers operate, through sophisticated algorithms and semantic technologies. The resulting analytics are validated by local experts and integrated with crowd-sourced input from clinical research centers through ViS' social network, where centers upload their disease-specific profiles. ViS' collaborative analytics approach integrates large amounts of data to provide up-to-date analytics, while enabling research centers to securely and efficiently showcase their disease-specific capabilities to trial planners.
Under the partnership agreement, and building upon ViS research platform, iCTRS and ViS will co-develop advanced, proprietary features for the platform that include automation of the Confidential Disclosure Agreement workflow and final sign-off, and enhanced analytical capabilities to rapidly compare feasibility information between sites.
"The entire feasibility process has needed revamping, and in partnering with iCTRS we expand our ability to deliver greater efficiency to the industry through innovative technologies in analysis, visualization, and networking," said Fabio Thiers, MD, PhD, ViS founder and CEO, a Harvard/MIT physician-scientist and pioneer in clinical research analytics. "We believe the use of these technologies could reduce waste in global clinical research by 10-15%."
The ViS partnership is the latest in a series of innovative partnerships announced by iCTRS that include Medikly, PatientsLikeMe.com, and Mytrus, Inc., in which inVentiv Health holds an equity stake – all designed to get much-needed medicines to market faster and more cost efficiently.
About inVentiv Health
inVentiv Health, Inc. is a leading global provider of best-in-class clinical, commercial and consulting services to the life sciences industry. inVentiv offers convergent services that accelerate the performance of companies working to improve human life. In 40 countries around the world, inVentiv's 12,000 employees work with more than 550 pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies, as well as companies that see health as a central part of their mission. inVentiv Health, Inc. is privately owned by inVentiv Group Holdings, Inc., an organization sponsored by affiliates of Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P., Liberty Lane Partners and members of the inVentiv management team. inVentiv Health helps clients transform promising ideas into commercial reality. For more information, visit http://www.inventivhealth.com.
About ViS Research (ViS)
The ViS online feasibility platform is the first that allows trial planners to use interactive visualizations to navigate the intricate, disease-specific decision matrix to immediately gather feasibility information from 400,000+ disease-specific research sites and 320,000+ investigators. ViS helps these investigative sites by decreasing their administrative burden related to feasibility questionnaires, while enabling them to efficiently display their disease-specific capabilities, at no cost. The end result is that optimal decisions can be reached using a small fraction of the time and cost incurred through conventional methods. The ViS Research Institute was created as a global enterprise in 2010, with trial planning experts in four continents. More information at http://www.visresearch.com.
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