CCBR-SYNARC and BioClinica have signed an agreement to merge their companies to create a global provider of specialised outsourced clinical services.
The combined company will offer a portfolio of services uniquely tailored to conducting and managing global clinical trials on behalf of the world’s premier pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Jeffrey McMullen, vice chairman of inVentiv Health, will serve as chairman of the combined company. Mark Weinstein, president and CEO of BioClinica, will serve as CEO.
McMullen, who has more than 40 years of experience in the drug development industry, says: “This is a ground-breaking merger that will bring together two of the industry’s most experienced providers of specialised clinical trial services. Combining CCBR-SYNARC and BioClinica into a single company will offer customers exceptional scientific expertise and sophisticated technologies to support their drug development processes and accelerate the pace of their innovation.”
As one entity, BioClinica and CCBR-SYNARC will become the market-leading provider of four highly specialised services that increase the speed and efficiency of global clinical trials. The combined company will provide customers with medical imaging services that track the effectiveness of new drugs across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, neurology and musculoskeletal. It will offer an extensive worldwide network of research centres dedicated to recruiting patients for global trials. It will provide technology and consulting services to support the overall drug development process, as well as services to monitor the cardiac safety of compounds under development. It also will offer central lab capabilities to analyse biological samples originating from clinical trials.
This merger comes at a time when demand for outsourced pharmaceutical services is projected to grow more than five per cent per year over the next five years. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly turning to specialists to help them manage their drug development processes.
The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014. Financial terms are not being disclosed.
