Business and People Update March 2009

People

Veronique Cardon

• Taking on the responsibility of business development for Image Metrix (Philadelphia, PA), including sales and marketing and client relations for existing clients and sponsors, Veronique Cardon has become the company's new director of client relations.

Jeffrey New

• Being praised as an "innovator in medical affairs" by PSI's (Research Triangle Park, NC) founder and president, Jeffrey New will serve as the company's new vice president of medical activities.

• Bringing with her over 15 years of industry experience and coming from leading health science organizations, such as Roche, Organon, and Abbott Laboratories, Kimberly Keyser will serve as Biomedical's (St. Louis, MO) new development director of pharmaceutical services.

Kimberly Keyser

• Penn Pharma (South Wales, UK) has filled its newly created position of operations director for the company's Welsh headquarters with Darren Hassey, leaving him responsible with all operational areas on site, including analytics, formulation, clinical trial supplies, logistics, and manufacturing.

Kimberly Keyser

• Enhancing its scientific and leadership capabilities, Velesco (Ann Harbor, MI) has added Peter Angus and Lisa Crandall to its core scientific team.

• The President and Chief Executive Officer of D. Anderson & Company (Dallas, TX), Diana Anderson will use her industry experience and influence in her new role as a member of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Research and Education Foundation (REF) Development Advisory Council.

• Filling the highest ranked position in ACRP (Alexandria, VA), David Vulcano has become the new chair of the Association Board of Trustees, while Heike Schoen was elected as vice chair. The association also appointed Kathryn Kimmel as chair of the Board of Trustees for the Academy of Clinical Research Professionals, where she will oversee certification functions.

• Adding to his responsibilities as chairman of the Department of Medical Research and director of the Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit at Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, MI, Gregory Kearns has joined Madeira Therapeutics (Leawood, KS) as a member of its board of advisors.

• Highlighting the establishment of Eden Biodesign's (Liverpool, UK) U.S. project management function is the appointment of Maria Lusk as the director of client management at the company's U.S. subsidiary located in Durham, NC.

• Maintaining his academic position at the University of Hasselt, Belgium and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, Tomasz Burzykowski will also now serve as IDDI's (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) director of research.

• APPI (Alexandria, VA) has made several appointments for the new year, including Peter Rheinstein as president-elect, Jonathan Seltzer, MD, as secretary–treasurer, and Christopher Allen, MD, Michael Koren, MD, and Jay Udani, MD, as members of the Board of Trustees.

Alliance News

• Upon agreement of a strategic collaboration, PPD (Wilmington, NC) will provide Merck (Whitehouse Station, NJ) with certain testing services to support the company's vaccine portfolio over five years. The agreement also includes that PPD will acquire Merck's 130,000 ft² vaccine-testing laboratory and equipment, located in Wayne, PA.

• To support its growth in the U.S. markets, CTI (Cincinnati, OH) has upgraded to the newest releases of the Oracle applications already in place and has also implemented the company's clinical trial management system.

• In order to help their clients submit CDISC SDTM-compliant data to FDA, Veristat (Holliston, MA) and ISI (Whippany, NJ) have chosen Phase Forward's (Waltham, MA) Web Submission Data Manager (WebSDM) application.

• In a clinical trial that is designed to compare two bone-imaging techniques, the Academy of Molecular Imaging has selected Image Metrix (Philadelphia, PA) as the CRO for the study.

• The EU-funded research project, cNEUPRO, which focuses on neurodegenerative diseases and discovering novel biomarkers, has selected BioGenes (Berlin, Germany) as a new partner that will provide lab facilities and key personnel.

• After a strong year of growth and the appointment of a new chief executive officer, CRF (Lansdale, PA) has announced a new investor smac partners (Unterhaching, Germany).

Awards

• Coming out the winner of a six-way competition, ImpediMed (Palo Alto, CA) was named the winner of the 2009 Australian Innovation Shoot Out.

• Three of Phlexglobal's (Buckinghamshire, UK) CTAs, Jenna Ashley, Nicky Hooker, and Nicola Rand (pictured right), were awarded first, second, and third place for Clinical Trial Administrator of the Year at the PharmaTimes Clinical Researcher of the Year 2008 Awards.

• The 2008 Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM) Data Driven Innovation Award competition awarded DSG (Malvern, PA) with second place because of its collaborative work with Human Genome Sciences.

[Left to right] Second place winner Nicky Hooker, top-ten finalist Kelly Greer (also of Phlexglobal), first place winner Jenna Ashley, and third place winner Nicola Rand.

Company News

• Trialytics (Plymouth Meeting, PA) has announced the expansion of its core services, which will now also include clinical trial data resources and multiple protocols, as well as a comprehensive physician lead qualification program.

• Responding to client demands for product development tools that will meet the challenges of problematic NCEs and product life cycle management, PII (Hunt Valley, MD) has launched a new business initiative, PII Drug Delivery Solutions.

• A partnership between Quintiles (Research Triangle Park, NC) and Apollo Hospitals Group has allowed the company to open a Phase I clinical trial unit in Hyderabad, India, which will provide customers with more options to complete their programs across multiple regions.

• After pursuing all practical alternatives, Patheon (Toronto, Canada) has had to close its facility in Puerto Rico as of January 31, 2009.

• Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) is set to lead the SonoDrugs project—a European project that will run for four years and targets the development of drug delivery technologies for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

• Almac (Craigavon, UK) has expanded its clinical trials services by adding a storage facility to its EU headquarters, to meet the demands from industry that call for cold-chain and controlled clinical supply storage.

• Cardiocore (Washington, DC) rang in the new year with the launch of a new Web site that will provide users with the company's history and a view of its leadership in service, science, and data management.

• clinIT AG (Frieburg, Germany) has been awarded a six-figure federal grant in order to pursue its intentions of developing a tool for automatic analysis of data quality in all types of clinical studies.

• The FDA's approval of SNM's (Reston, VA) centralized multicenter IND application for FLT—an investigational PET imaging biomarker—was the first successful demonstration of the agency's step toward allowing multiple sources of FLT to be reviewed under a single IND.

New Facilities

• After experiencing expansion in its business delivering electronic document management solutions, Good Products (Irvine, CA) will now be expanding its UK presence with a new and larger headquarters located in Nottingham.

• Moving forward with the expansion of its services to now include a broader range of central nervous system-related investigations, Lifetree Clinical Research (Salt Lake City, UT) has created the Lifetree Center for Neuroscience Research.

• Continuing with an ongoing expansion to its North American presence, Datatrial (Raleigh, NC) has moved to a new and larger office located in Raleigh, which will be overseen by a new general manager, Craig Pyne

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