Business and People Update May 2009

People

Melynda Geurts

• Melynda Geurts, chief operating officer of D.L. Anderson (Dallas, TX), and Roy Fleischmann, MD, medical director of Metroplex Clinical Research Center (Dallas, TX), have both been elected as the newest members of D.L. Anderson's Board of Directors.

Roy Fleischmann

• After serving as head of preclinical development for Medigene AG (Munich, Germany) for the last nine years, Ulrich Moebius will now take on the position of head of preclinical development and project management at MorphoSys (Munich, Germany).

Ulrich Moebius

• The role of business development executive at Penn Pharma's (Wilmington, DE) North American location will be filled by James Knapp, who joins the company after a seven-year tenure at Almac (Craigavon, UK).

James Knapp

• Formerly holding senior positions in professional services and implementation management, William Broucek will now serve in the newly developed position of senior director, professional services, at Velos (Fremont, CA).

• With more than 20 years experience in virology drug development, Sharon Lynn Benoit will now serve as INC Research's (Raleigh, NC) principal strategist of Infectious Disease.

• Applied Clinical Trial's Editorial Advisory Board member and executive director of the Good Clinical Practice Alliance, Europe, Francis P. Crawley, has been selected as the chairman of ICR's (Bourne End, UK) annual spring conference and exhibition working party.

• Of the 12 nominees for this year's European Inventor of the Year award, four come from the pharmaceutical arena: Jurg Zimmermann of Switzerland, Brian Druker of the United States, Yiqing Zhou and his team from China, and Germany's Maria-Regina Kula.

Alliance

• To ensure compliance with EU Good Manufacturing Practices, the Netherlands Vaccine Institute (Bilthoven, The Netherlands) has chosen to use Sparta System's (Holmdel, NJ) TrackWise Enterprise Quality Management solution.

• Extending its platform of QA data validation solutions, RealityCorp (Newport, DE) will partner with Mission3 (Phoenix, AZ) to utilize the company's ranging suite of project planning, document management, regulatory submissions, and collaborative authoring.

• In an attempt to quantify the effectiveness of its cartilage repair device, BioSyntech (Quebec, Canada) will use VirtualScopics (Rochester, NY) to provide blinded data analysis of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Company News

• Praxis (Brentwood, TN) will provide recruitment services for a national study on Hepatitis C that explores an investigational drug's effectiveness as a mono-treatment as well as an add-on treatment option for the condition.

• In response to client requests, Premier Research (Philadelphia, PA) announced it will now offer its medical device operations in the United States.

• As the last of Quintiles' (Research Triangle Park, NC) central labs to receive the acknowledgment, the company's facility in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was recently accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP).

• SGS Life Science Services, part of the SGS Group (Geneva, Switzerland), recently sponsored one family's participation, the Michels, in the North Pole Marathon, which raises money and awareness for Cystic Fibrosis research.

Mergers/Acquisitions

• Allowing PPD (Wilmington, NC) immediate entry into Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Croatia, is an agreement that it will acquire AbC.R.O. (Sofia, Bulgaria).

• After working together under an exclusive alliance and maintaining a long-time partnership, ACM Global Central Laboratory (Rochester, NY) is finalizing its acquisition of Pivotal Laboratories (York, UK).