Two San Diego-based CROs are combining operations, and the buyer sees an opportunity to better serve its customers for preclinical services through integrating research software.
BioTox Sciences has agreed to purchase fellow CRO Bio-Quant from drug developer Apricus Biosciences ($APRI), which says today that it will reap at least $5 million up front from the deal and milestone payments of up to $20 million over the next 10 years. While BioTox President Sami Abundi says that the deal expands his firm's footprint in offering drug discovery and preclinical research services, he pointed out that there are synergies between Bio-Quant's and Bio-Tox's information technology systems.
"We can now take our clients' compounds through the preclinical drug development process and utilize state-of-the-art capabilities by integrating Bio-Quant's study execution software platform Intranet with BioTox's sponsor friendly and GLP compliant study data acquisition software, called iAdavantage, and thus accelerate the development process economically and effectively," Abundi said in a statement.
In fact, CROs around the world are boosting their investments in IT and developing their own proprietary software systems to help their customers in the life sciences industry streamline drug R&D. While many other companies are targeting the clinical-stage segment of the market, BioTox is taking this strategy to the preclinical phase, where there's also a lot of room to use IT to make multiple processes and experiments run more efficiently.
- check out the report from RTT News
- here's Apricus's release as it appears in MarketWatch