Pharma groups take too long and spend too much to develop drugs, and the industry has tinkered with various strategies to make R&D more efficient. At Medidata Solutions ($MDSO), Glen de Vries and his colleagues have been working for more than a decade on software that streamlines clinical trials, and their work isn't nearly done.
De Vries and I have spoken several times over the past year about how cloud computing and other innovations are changing the way clinical trials data and operations are managed. And we recently agreed to have our next chat in the Twitterverse, where we hope readers of Fierce and people interested in clinical IT can participate.
I'm thrilled to co-op with de Vries for this Twitter chat. He is the co-founder and president of Medidata (on Twitter under the handle @Medidata) who realized back in the 1990s that the handling of clinical trials data was in for serious change. Back then, as many of you know, the status quo for keeping data on patients in trials involved lots of paper. Thanks to de Vries (whose Twitter handle is @CaptainClinical) and other visionaries, electronic data capture (EDC) is now a gold standard for collecting trials data.
But what's next? Big Pharma has been outsourcing huge chunks of development work to CROs, and most major pharma groups have internal and outside partners spread across the world to help advance R&D work. Alan Hippe, Roche's ($RHHBY) information and financial chief, has pushed his company to embrace cloud resources such as Google Apps to connect his global workforce. And de Vries thinks that a cloud-based platform for clinical trials makes sense, too.
De Vries and I plan to discuss how clinical trials systems fit into the cloud, next-generation EDC capabilities, the rise of mobile tech in trials and several other important topics in clinical tech.
Join us at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time on May 22 for our live conversation. You can follow our chat by accessing FierceBiotech IT's Twitter feed, or by following the hashtag #FBITchat. Feel free to send questions this week that you'd like me to ask de Vries during our live chat. -- Ryan McBride (Email | Twitter)