Jan 31 | eCliniqua | An assortment of emerging clinical trial technologies over the past decade are providing creative ways for pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations (CROs) to boost the quality, pace, and efficiency of their drug development programs. The promise is sporadically realized by companies that selectively and appropriately apply these tools and use timely and visible performance metrics as the basis for relationship-building with clinical investigators. Working recipes are not often diligently followed, however. Thus clinical trials performance, in the main, remains dreadful.

Jan 25 | New York Times | The government's new drug development center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, isn't intended to be comptetitive with the private sector, says NIH director Francis Collins. The center is slated to open in October and will be one of the 27 centers and institutes under the National Institutes of Health.

Jan 20 | News Brief | Cetero Research, an early-stage contract research organization, has appointed Roger Hayes as president, bioanalytical operations. For the past 10 years, Hayes has served as director of bioanalytical at Schering-Plough Research Institute. 

Jan 18 | New York Times |  Johns Hopkins researchers have found that published papers on clinical trials rarely cite previous works on the same topic.

Jan 18 | eCliniqua | Mike Wilkinson, CIO and executive vice president at PPD, has a message for pharma: “We’re in this together as partners; we’re not a vendor anymore. I think we need to move away from that kind of transactional approach where all they’re looking for is to have a vendor and buy a service. That’s not going to work in this environment.”

Jan 13 | Boston Business Journal | Parexel and Merck have signed a deal to help the pharma develop generic versions of biologics.

Jan 10 | Comment |  The contract research market grew 13% in 2009, reaching $23.5 billion, according to the Contract Research Annual Review 2010 report. But as these partnerships with contract research organizations (CRO) become more common, it will become essential to establish collaborative communications with their partners and leverage workflows to help encourage communication and improve the efficiency of the working relationship. A partner portal, connecting the sponsor with the CRO, is an effective platform to achieve these goals.

Jan 10 | News Brief | BIND Biosciences has started the Phase 1 trial for the first candidate from its broad proprietary Medicinal Nanoengineering platform.

Jan 5 | Wall Street Journal | The FDA approved about 21 drugs in 2010, a relatively modest figure that shows the pharmaceutical industry hasn't yet escaped its drought in recent years.

Jan 5 | News Brief | DIA has announced a regulatory affairs certificate program to provide comprehensive training on current regulations and their practical application to the development and commercialization of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, and related health care products.

Dec 27 | UC Davis | A UC Davis study has found that electronic medical records may not be the "silver bullet" of health care reform that some hoped. The study measured the impact of electronic medical record-keeping on doctors' productivity.

Dec 22 | Healthcare IT News | PwC has released six healthcare trends for 2011 based on a survey of 1,000 Americans including record spending on health-IT, big changes in benefit plan design and pricing, and further merger and acquisition activity.

Dec 17 | News Brief | TechTeam Global has been acquired by Stefanini IT Solutions Group, resulting in a merger of the two companies to form a new subsidiary, Stefanini TechTeam.

Dec 16 | Mass High Tech | Charles River Laboratories plans seek "strategic alternatives" for two facilities: a Phase I research clinic in the U.S. and a pre-clinical research facility in China.

Dec 15 | News Brief | Medtronic has announced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval and the market launch of CareLink Pro 3.0 Therapy Management Software, the first software program to offer advanced decision support to health care professionals managing diabetes.

Nov 15 | eCliniqua | Copernicus Group made a fairly weighty donation to a local North Carolina school last month: four boxes of paperclips and binder clips all formerly used to wrangle the “paper-moving beast” that was Copernicus’ clinical trial review process. The independent institutional review board (IRB) doesn’t need them anymore. They’ve gone completely paperless.

Nov 16 | eCliniqua | Researchers at Novartis in Basel have developed a powerful new electronic data capture (EDC) hub for clinical data that has allowed its investigators to control data across multiple trials as never before, according to David Tuch, head of clinical imaging at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, Switzerland. “This is a game changer for managing clinical trials at Novartis.”