August 30, 2016 | New partnerships and products from Leapcure, Duke Clinical Research Institute, Definiens, and more.  

Leapcure and Scientist.com are partnering on patient recruitment for clinical trials. Leapcure will provide patient recruitment services for users of Scientist.com’s network of 10 pharmaceutical research marketplaces. The partnership will provide white-label, global clinical recruitment services using Leapcure’s smart patient engagement platform. Leapcure's Adaptive Patient Screening Platform (APSP) recruits patients based on the study's conditions, inclusion/exclusion criteria, location, and procedure. This allows better quality patients to sign up, reduces the recruitment process to days instead of months, and ensures patient retention throughout the trial. Press release.

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals and the Duke Clinical Research Institute(DCRI) have announced the expansion of the Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis – PROspective Outcomes (IPF-PRO) Registry, a patient registry developed to uncover insights into IPF, a rare and serious lung disease. The expansion will increase the study enrollment from 300 patients at 18 study sites to 1,500 patients at approximately 45 sites, creating the largest registry of newly diagnosed IPF patients. The IPF-PRO Registry, which was launched in June 2014, was the first multi-center longitudinal disease state registry in the United States focused specifically on IPF. Boehringer Ingelheim and the DCRI have agreed to expand the IPF-PRO Registry based on the quality of the data and insights obtained from the first 300 patients enrolled in the registry and the growing scientific need for diverse, real-world data to understand IPF disease progression, disease history, patient-reported outcomes and disease biomarkers. Press release.

Definiens has released its Clinical Development Offering, a new service that enables pharmaceutical companies to improve patient outcomes and reduce pipeline risk, ultimately moving therapies to market more quickly and improving the success of drug programs. Leveraging Tissue Phenomics, Definiens provides robust and precise quantitative IHC, ISH, and IF assays to identify tissue features in context that can be easily combined with other data types to mine for clinically relevant patterns.The Clinical Development Offering provides clinical trial services, signature discovery services, and companion diagnostics services. Press release.

Certara has launched Phoenix 7.0, an update to its intuitive, and widely-used software for pharmacokinetic (PK), pharmacodynamic (PD), and toxicokinetic (TK) modeling and simulation. Phoenix is used by 6,000 researchers at 1,500 biopharmaceutical companies and 200 academic institutions in 60 countries. Phoenix is also employed by many global regulatory agencies for submittal review, including seven divisions of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). New features and enhancements in Phoenix 7.0 include: a new graphics engine which generates publication-quality images right out of the box, eliminating the need for third-party graphing tools; a new data layer that uses 90% less memory and greatly improves the user experience when working with large datasets or modeling projects; integrated parallel computing technology, which cuts non-compartmental analysis (NCA) time by 50%; and more. Press release.

Princeton University has joined the New York Genome Center (NYGC) as its newest Associate Member. This collaboration with Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, will help strengthen NYGC’s focus on clinically actionable genomics and science. As an Associate Member, Princeton and the Institute’s faculty will have priority access to NYGC’s Integrated Genomic Solutions, including next-generation sequencing for exomes, whole genomes and RNA; bioinformatics analysis of sequencing results, using a high-performance computing environment; and data management and storage.  In addition, the relationship offers access to NYGC’s CLEP-certified laboratory services and to new technologies through NYGC’s Innovation Center.  Press release.