IMS Health, the healthcare information giant, glommed onto another small software provider to build its clinical trials business. The company bought TTC, which offers online tools for benchmarking costs of clinical trials and negotiating with study sites, tacking on technology and services that complement its April buyout of DecisionView.
TTC, founded in 2002, provides its technology and services to 17 of the 20 biggest drugmakers and 8 of the 10 largest contract research organizations, according to IMS. Its roster of clients carries importance beyond validating its business success; TTC's customers feed the company with data on the costs of their own trials performed all over the world, which enables the company to provide useful benchmarks based on about three quarters of clinical trials performed in recent years, Linda Drumright, general manager of IMS' Clinical Trial Optimization Solutions unit, explained in an interview.
Philadelphia-based TTC, whose website lists a second office in London, becomes part of the group that Drumright, the former CEO of DecisionView, leads from her office in San Francisco. While TTC gives trial sponsors a handle on how their costs and budgets should look, the technology from DecisionView enables them to forecast enrollment timelines for studies and identify the most suitable trial sites for their goals. As Drumright says, IMS plans to integrate the technologies and capabilities from these recent purchases with its own data and tech.
"The IMS strategic vision is, within clinical trials, to promote this as a growth area," Drumright told FierceBiotechIT. "We want to optimize strategic clinical processes to help customers bring their trials in on time, on budget, et cetera. What you are seeing and what you're going to see is a series of organic growth and acquisitive growth around optimizing the process from planning through initiation to execution" of clinical trials.
Clinical trials are notorious for failing to wrap up on schedule and within set budgets, creating a growing niche for companies whose tech and services address these bugaboos in biopharma. Oracle ($ORCL), which gained trial budgeting and planning software in its buyout of ClearTrial earlier this year, and Medidata Solutions ($MDSO), compete with IMS in this area.
- here's the release
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