Business and People Update October 2008

People

• With 20 years of experience within the IT industry, particularly for life sciences companies, Adam Sherlock will become Image Solution's (Whippany, NJ) managing director of Europe, after having served as the company's director of business development.

Adam Sherlock

•Lex Jansen will serve as Octagon Research Solution's (Wayne, PA) senior consultant of clinical data strategies. Bringing with him nearly 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, he previously served as a senior director of clinical information systems at TAKE Solutions (Princeton, NJ).

Lex Jansen

•RadPharm (Princeton, NJ) appointed Steven Owens to the company's newly created position of chief information officer, where Owens will serve on the executive committee and provide leadership to IT and development projects.

Steven Owens

•Vincent Renz has become the president of NewCardio (Santa Clara, CA), allotting him the responsibility of the company's business development, client services, software development, and quality assurance.

Vincent Renz

• Bringing with him 18 years of experience in a range of therapeutic areas, Warren Prosser, MBA, will serve as vice president of Clinical Operations for Global Neurology, with INC Research (Raleigh, NC).

•TOPIGEN Pharmaceuticals (Montreal, Quebec Canada) has appointed Mark Parry-Billings to chief executive officer, after serving as chief development officer since 2007.

•Serving as the company's president and chief operating officer since October 2007, the board of directors of Helicos BioSciences (Cambridge, MA) appointed Steve Lombardi as the new chief executive officer.

•Sepracor (Marlborough, MA) appointed two senior managers within the organization: Richard Ranieri fills the new position of executive vice president, human resources and administration; and Julio Casoy, MD, has been appointed to senior vice president of medical affairs.

•John Nestor has become the vice president of drug discovery for Transition Therapeutics (Toronto) where he will lead a group of research scientists in focusing on the company's new discovery projects.

•Scott Neilson joins AAIPharma (Wilmington, NC) as its new chief operating officer, which leaves him responsible for the company's global drug development services operations.

•After acting as BioDuro's vice president of business development and collaboration management, Steven Hutchins will become the new vice president of business development at Wuxi PharmaTech. The company also promoted Rujian Ma to vice president of synthetic chemistry.

•PhaseOneTrials has increased its staff with seven new members: Yasmina Sahraoui will become the senior director of business development; Karin Andersen is now the full time QA manager; Britt Bors Bonde, Birgit Hauggaard-Nielsen, and Hanne Sogaard will serve as study nurses; and Dorthe Baunbjerg Nielsen is the new coordinator of lab and logistics.

•Ikaria (Clinton, NJ) has added two new executive members to its team, including Stephen Ross as senior vice president of commercial operations, and James Briggs who will serve as senior vice president of human relations.

•Continuing on its ambitious goal of discovering as many drugs as possible within 18 months, Addrenex (Durham, NC) has added three new members to its team: Steven Butts, MBA, has become vice president of commercial operations; Gary Beam is the new senior director of scientific affairs; and Yuki Prescott will serve as clinical trials manager.

Alliances

• Extending their collaboration for an additional year, Karo Bio AB (Huddinge, Sweden) and Wyeth (Madison, NJ) intend on continuing to identify and develop subjects and further assess clinical possibilities in the treatment of atherosclerosis.

• Among the many levels of restructuring Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN) is undergoing, it is also outsourcing its clinical trial monitoring work in the United States and Puerto Rico to Quintiles (Research Triangle Park, NC), which is expected to effect about 265 of Lilly's employees.

• AgenoLab GmbH & Co. KG (Stuttgart-Wangen, Germany) has become the first company in the world to utilize Roche Applied Science's (Indianapolis, IN) xCELLigence System, which was purchased at the Analytica 2008 trade in Munich.

• Based on a successful first year, Ablynx (Ghent, Belgium) and Boehringer Ingelheim (Ridgefield, CN) have extended their Alzheimer's disease collaboration for an additional year.

• Based on a recent marketing services agreement, Eden Biodesign (Liverpool, UK) will assist Human Genome Sciences (Rockville, MD) with the task of identifying new manufacturing clients.

• Upon signing a business development contract with Ameristart (Lake Wylie, SC), Factory CRO's (Bilthoven, The Netherlands) clinical research services will soon be promoted in the North American medical device market.

• After having satisfactory results with Omnicomm System's (Fort Lauderdale, FL) CRO Preferred Program, Systems Medicine (Tuscon, AZ) will use its EDC software in a Phase II oncology study.

• With intentions of furthering its capabilities in Asia and enhancing access to new medicines that may benefit patients with inoperable Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC), AstraZeneca (Wilmington, DE) has entered a partnership with the National Cancer Centre Singapore (Singapore) and the National University Hospital (Singapore) to develop anticancer compounds.

• Zafgen (Boston, MA) has entered into an agreement in which it will utilize Anthill Technologies' (Woburn, MA) high-speed chemistry technologies and capabilities in its obesity program.

• Upon expanding their three-year partnership, Arch Pharmalabs (Mumbai, India) will be Codexis' (Redwood City, CA) exclusive manufacturer for the pharmaceutical intermediates and active pharmaceutical ingredients that it offers.

• Pharsights' (Mountain View, CA) WinNonlin AutoPilot has been purchased by a global biotechnology company, making it the seventh company to adopt the software.

Awards

• Inc. magazine has announced its list of the 5000 fastest growing privately owned companies in the United States, which includes MedNet (Minneapolis, MN); ProTrials Research (Mountain View, CA); Clinical Resource Network (Deerfield, IL); and, Lifetree Clinical Research (Salt Lake City, UT).

• Phase Forward's (Waltham, MA) customer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA) has been awarded CIO magazine's 2008 CIO 100 award, which is an annual award program that acknowledges organizations worldwide for exemplifying excellence in information technology.

• Chan Russell, president of Phase Forward's (Waltham, MA) Lincoln Safety Group, has been named to the Boston Business Journal Champions in Health Care list.

Company News

• Medvance Clinical Research (North Yorkshire, UK) has launched a new resource division called Medvance Resourcing, which was designed to provide the industry with clinical professionals that have experience with clinical trials for medical devices.

• After working with over 1000 clinical trials across more than 70 languages in the past five years, thebigwordgroup (Leeds, UK), a translation and interpreting company, established a new division specifically for life sciences.

• The Women's Business Development Center-Chicago has certified Clinical Resource Network (Deerfield, IL) as a Women's Business Enterprise, which confirms the business is at least 51% woman-owned, operated, and controlled.

• Azopharma (Miramar, FL) has established, Acromon Clinical Research Organization, a new company formed to further expand its clinical research management services.

• People interested in learning about or joining a lupus clinical trial now have the Center for Clinical Trials Education, created by the Lupus Foundation of America (Washington, DC), as a resource.

• The U.S. Drug Approval Trends and Yearbook 2008/2009, Parexel's (Boston, MA) overview of drug approval trends and metrics, shows that U.S. marketing applications for new molecular entities increased 33% in 2007.

• The Foundation for Improving Data Quality (FIDQ; Southeastern, PA) had its first meeting, in which the discussion focused on future initiatives to achieve stronger success rates of clinical trials dependent on subjective endpoints.

• The FDA accepted a data submission from Bridge Laboratories' (Gaithersburg, MD) Beijing facility, helping to solidify its purpose as a U.S.-based CRO that conducts GLP studies for drug development services globally.

Mergers/Acquisitions

• In response to growing demands for the integration of Electronic Data Capture (EDC) with Interactive Response Technology (IRT), Phase Forward (Waltham, MA) has completed the acqusition of Clarix (Radnor, PA) for the cost of $40 million.

• In attempts to strengthen its drug discovery group, Transition Therapeutics (Toronto, ON) acquired certain assets and exclusive rights to three drug discovery projects from Forbes Medi-Tech (Vancouver, BC).

• Parexel (Boston, MA) acquired Clinphone plc (Nottingham, UK) and will combine it with its wholly owned subsidiary, Perceptive Informatics, making it one of the industry's largest eClinical technology providers.

• The drug discovery assets of Sareum Holdings (Cambridge, UK) have been acquired by Galapagos (Mechelen, Belgium) for the amount of 553,000 GBP ($971,363 USD).

• After the majority of SGX (San Diego, CA) stockholders had voted in favor of the merger agreement, Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN) completed the acquisition of the company, which was valued at a total purchase price of $64 million.

New Facilities

• IDIS (London, UK) has opened a new office in Iselin, NJ, which according to the company, places it in a better position to service U.S. based pharmaceutical companies.

• Furthering the restructure of its research and development organization, Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN) is finalizing plans to lease a new and expanded headquarters in Hancock County, IN, for its animal health division, Elanco.
• Clinilabs' (New York, NY) expansion plan for its Phase I unit has reached a completion.