Velos Set to Clear 50 Percent Market Penetration of Large U.S. Clinical Research Sites by Year End

Velos Set to Clear 50 Percent Market Penetration of Large U.S. Clinical Research Sites by Year End

   FREMONT, Calif., Aug. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Velos, Inc., the recognized leader and trusted resource for clinical trial management information systems for large investigator sites, today announced it will cross the 50 percent market penetration threshold by year end.  The company's flagship product, Velos eResearch, targets the needs of medical researchers with a particular focus on large academic medical research institutions with diverse user populations, and a wide variety of research information needs and challenges.
    The measure uses the amount of NIH grant dollars awarded to Velos customers among the 100 largest such grant recipients who conduct clinical research. This group historically receives about 80 percent of total extramural NIH clinical research funding.  The company's customers in this group receive 47 percent of NIH funding. Together with new Velos customers in contract stage, this figure will increase to just over 50 percent by year end.  The figure only includes paying customers and excludes other research sites which may also use Velos eResearch as participants in clinical trials led by Velos customers.  "Fifty percent is a pretty good level of market penetration to achieve five years from product launch, which reflects quite a bit of preparation work," observed John McIlwain, President and CEO of Velos, Inc.
    While Velos eResearch was launched in 2003, the company spent years and millions of dollars between 1996 and 2003 designing and redesigning multiple iterations of the product before it launched.  "It's taken years of work, singular focus, robust product design, and fabulous customers with great input to get to this stage," said Priti Sahai, MD, Velos Vice President of Product Development.
    Now in Version 8, the robust Velos system allows large academic medical centers and research institutions -- that have unique and expansive requirements -- to apply Velos eResearch in a wide variety of creative and productive ways, in addition to standard clinical trial fulfillment. Some examples include:

   -- Patient-self reporting:  Customers capture research or outcomes data directly from patients on touch screen, Internet-platform kiosks in the clinic, prior to the patient visit.  The data are used by physicians for care-giving purposes during the same patient visit and are posted to the Velos research database. Some institutions use such patient self-reporting capabilities on-line, enabling patients to report research and outcomes data before and after treatment in accordance with study protocols.
   -- Comprehensive research database:  Some customers use Velos to capture all patient data, not just clinical trial data.  These data are then used for outcomes, research, and publication purposes.
    -- Clinical trial networks and consortiums:  One Velos customer runs a statewide research consortium with hundreds of users across dozens of sites, fulfilling 50 or so clinical trials. Another group of very large cancer centers uses a federated Velos database grid to conduct dozens of clinical trials that are supported by both government and pharmaceutical sponsors at sites across the U.S.  
    -- South Korea, with a population about the size of California, uses Velos for cancer research for the entire country.

   Velos customers also use Velos eResearch for research budgeting and billing, on-line protocol review meetings, federal reporting, tissue and specimen management, registry reporting, and more.
    The company's product design strategy from the start has been "go deep and broad."  Medicine and medical research are specialty disciplines, which means products need to be able to "go deep" in supporting particular specialty areas of research.  To "go deep" effectively, a system must also support researcher collaborators across many institutions in the same specialty area.  At the same time, within any one institution, research is usually conducted in many disease or subspecialty areas which means systems must also "go broad." In both camps, a range of user needs and perspectives must be supported, including those of investigators, study coordinators, research managers, compliance officers, financial specialists, and system administrators. "Simply put, our product and service strategy is to go deeper and broader,"
continued Dr. Sahai.

About Velos eResearch

   Velos eResearch is a comprehensive clinical research management product line designed specifically for investigators and their research teams.  The product line blends easily into existing workflows, streamlining and accelerating the research process and supporting high quality, productive clinical trial fulfillment.  Answering the need for a connectivity and data aggregating solution in the field of clinical research, Velos eResearch offers a cost-effective means to bring together all the participants in the research process. Velos has ushered in a new generation of Internet-platform research capabilities that fundamentally improves the pervasiveness and efficiency of clinical research for the research team, trial sponsors, and the patient.  These activities include study design, patient recruitment, task/time management and facilitating investigator and IRB activities leading up to the posting of patient results to a study database.  Such activities need to be deeply and intelligently linked to patient clinical and lab data collection, CRF-related data capture, adverse event management, and monitoring.  Velos eResearch integrates these information needs in an easy-to-use,
workflow-oriented environment.

About Velos

   Velos is the trusted clinical trial management resource for investigators, sponsors and academic leaders throughout the U.S. A diverse range of end users across the Velos customer base use Velos eResearch to improve the efficiency and safety of their clinical studies.  Velos market share among large, highly regarded medical centers has continued to increase throughout the past few years and now includes 21 Top 25* U.S. centers. Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) winners have chosen Velos by a wide margin versus all other vendors combined.  Velos eResearch customers receive 47 percent of extramural clinical research funding from the National Institutes of
Health -- also the largest such share for any commercial clinical trial management system.  Most of these larger institutions are rolling out Velos eResearch across their healthcare systems and medical research programs.  Founded in 1996, Velos is privately held with headquarters in Fremont, California.  For more information, visit http://www.velos.com.

   This press release may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

   * U.S. News and World Report 2008 America's Best Hospitals

SOURCE  Velos, Inc.