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| BioClinica CEO Mark Weinstein |
Just three months after wrapping its latest merger, BioClinica has made another acquisition, snapping up Blueprint Clinical to expand its capabilities in the growing field of risk-based management.
Under the deal, the eClinical-focused BioClinica gets its hands on Compass, Blueprint's cloud-based tool for tracking and scoring clinical trial sites. The system is designed to mitigate risk by evaluating threats to patient safety and assigning a performance-based score to each site, the company said, allowing sponsors and CROs to spot potential problems before they derail a study.
Combined with BioClinica's in-house trial software, Compass' offering will allow the CRO to offer what it calls "intelligent monitoring," potentially reducing costs and easing regulatory compliance for its clients, CEO Mark Weinstein said.
"Ever since the FDA issued its final guidance to industry on risk-based monitoring last year, there's been an explosion of interest in technology to make it a reality," Weinstein said in a statement. "Compass provides a transformative risk-based monitoring solution that enables the industry to move forward."
The rise of adaptive trials is largely seen as a boon to CROs with scale, as establishing proprietary technology would require a significant upfront investment, leading drugmakers to lean on their contractors instead of going it alone. And BioClinica is hardly alone in seeing its promise, as industry giants Parexel ($PRXL) Quintiles ($Q) and Icon ($ICLR) all contend in the space, and the latter just paid $143.5 million for Aptiv Solutions to scale up its presence.
BioClinica just wrapped up its second merger in as many years, in March absorbing CCBR-Synarc and stretching its focus to include medical imaging and specialty services for clinical trials. Last year, private equity firm JLL Partners bought BioClinica for $123 million and subsequently merged the company with CoreLab, owned by Ampersand Capital Partners, which kept its stake in the combined outfit. In the last merger, announced in January, CCBR-Synarc owner Water Street is hanging on to its stake in that CRO, creating a private equity trio at the reins of the new BioClinica.
- read the statement