PRA has cut the ribbon on a new facility in Wales, planning to add about 100 new jobs in its informatics unit with help from the local government.
The Swansea site opened its doors last week, and PRA received about $2 million in financing from the Welsh government to fund the expansion. The facility will house much of PRA's clinical informatics operations, and the CRO is looking to hire programmers and data managers while establishing a multi-lingual help desk for its clients around the world.
PRA Executive Vice President Steve Powell said the Welsh government's support was essential in the expansion, and the company will scale up its local operation over the next three years.
"As a leading CRO, we are committed to the growth of our Swansea team and to transforming clinical trials across all phases of drug development; the new building and jobs demonstrate PRA's commitment to offering a more dynamic service to our customers, both locally and internationally," Powell said in a statement.
The new facility doubles the capacity of PRA's previous Welsh home, where it employed 100 clinical informatics workers. When the build-out is complete, the CRO will employ 200 at the site to collect, analyze and interpret data from clinical trials.
The Welsh expansion follows a similar arrangement in Kansas, in which PRA received a $400,000 grant from the Kansas Bioscience Authority to bolster its operations in Lenexa and hire 80 more workers.
- read the statement