CDMO conglomerate Almac is pouring $48 million into its eClinical offering via an investment that includes the launch of a new trial coordinator.
The “first-in-class” platform will address the top technology challenges that hinder contract research organizations and clinical sites, according to Almac's Oct. 14 release.
The trial coordinator is designed to join operational processes, clinical data and systems together into one unified protocol, presenting a novel solution to the industry’s “pressing and unmet system fragmentation challenge,” Almac explained.
Armed with unique usability features and backed by reusable libraries of standardized study templates, the interoperable platform is poised to widen the net of clinical trial sites that are capable of meeting the “demands of modern clinical trials,” the company said.
“This investment underscores our commitment to delivering flexible, scalable solutions that empower sponsors and sites to run complex trials with confidence and efficiency,” said Valarie Higgins, managing director of Almac's interactive response technology (IRT)-focused Almac Clinical Technologies arm.
Almac expects the investment to create more than 100 advanced technology jobs across the globe.
The company is rolling out its trial coordinator at a crucial juncture in the industry. While on the hunt for a branch to expand beyond its IRT business, Higgins realized that a “much bigger problem” in the clinical trial ecosystem wasn’t being addressed, she explained in an exclusive interview with Fierce Biotech.
What was once widespread concern over patient recruitment and retention has shifted in recent years to struggles with clinical site burden. The source of the burden, as Higgins has found, is missteps and challenges that sites experience when navigating a large amount of ongoing trials that each have different systems. The troubles have mounted to the point that site participation in clinical trials is becoming a real concern, prompting Almac to explore ways to streamline processes.
“We're trying to solve that problem of simplifying the conduct of clinical trials, which improves compliance, speed, your ability to retain and recruit sites and for the entire trial to be successful,” Higgins explained.
Almac has been in the clinical technologies game for quite some time and, as one of the first IRT providers, is no stranger to introducing a first-to-market product. The company expects adoption of its new platform to be “pretty strong,” Higgins said, especially as it has made it “very easy to plug and play.”
Almac offers services across the spectrum of clinical and commercial needs through its array of business units. While its pharma services side has been on an expansion drive as of late, Almac’s clinical technologies offering boasts the “most flexible IRT suite in the industry,” according to its website.