Quintiles has taken its relationship with pharma partner Eli Lilly ($LLY) to the next level. Short of moving in together, the pharma services giant has inked a 5-year lease on about 12,000 square feet in the Pan Am Plaza building in Indianapolis in part to support an ongoing project that uses information technology to streamline drug development at Lilly.
The project taps "big data" to enable better decision-making in drug development, Phil Bridges, a spokesman for Quintiles, told FierceBiotech in an email. For the past three years, he said, Lilly and Quintiles have worked together on a "unique information technology-driven project to re-engineer the way clinical trials are designed and how clinical plans are formulated. The goal of the collaboration has been to develop an integrated approach to optimizing how trials are conducted [and] eliminate costly inefficiencies."
Lilly has sought deeper ties with Quintiles and other external partners to nimbly advance new drugs to market as the Indianapolis-based drugmaker reels from generics competition to Zyprexa and soon Cymbalta. Company CEO John Lechleiter has previously talked up the use of IT and other technologies to bolster efforts to bring new medicines to market. And Lilly also gained headlines in recent years for its early adoption in pharma of Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure.
Durham, NC-based Quintiles plans to initially house 50 workers in its new Indy office, with that number growing to up to 65 by the end of the year, Bridges said. The operation is expected to serve the Lilly collaboration and other IT and data-driven projects. He didn't specify the exact types of Big Data involved in the Lilly project, but there are a variety from genome sequencing, clinical, and other studies that biopharma outfits have scrambled to harness and analyze for drug research.
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