Certara has scooped up competitor Great Lakes Drug Development (GLDD), a Brighton, MI-based provider of services focused on early drug development, the buyer announced on Tuesday. St. Louis-based Certara chose not to disclose financial details of the acquisition.
The GLDD team is joining Certara's Pharsight group, a consultancy that specializes in quantitative analysis and predictive models of diseases, pharma compounds and clinical trials. With the acquired company's Michigan office, Certara adds a sixth global location to its network of offices in Montreal; Tokyo; Sunnyvale, CA; Cary, NC; and Sheffield, England.
"This acquisition will enable us to leverage the significant synergies between Certara's and GLDD's business focus, experience, and culture, while expanding our customer base," stated Daniel Weiner, Certara's senior vice president and general manager.
Certara's expansion comes as researchers rely more heavily than before on computational approaches to make decisions about drug development, in part because of the convergence of extremely powerful computing and large amounts of patient and molecular data. The company recently released a computer model of human heart cells for gauging potential drug toxicity.
- here's the release