May 23, 2018 | May was full of exciting news in the clinical trial and healthcare community, including partnerships, products, and promotions from Veeva, WCG, Charles River, and more.

Veeva introduced a new commercial data warehouse for life sciences. Veeva Nitro eliminates the burden of custom-built data warehouses with an industry-specific data model and standard integrations that unify companies’ most important data sources. Now the life sciences industry will have a ready-to-use commercial data warehouse in the cloud that is tailored to its needs with the ease of implementation, configuration, and ongoing enhancements that come with a packaged software solution. With Veeva Nitro, the industry will finally have the right commercial data foundation for artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to deliver business insights faster. Because of the lack of a high-quality, packaged commercial data warehouse solution, companies build and maintain their own, requiring significant time and resources. These custom-built solutions are not quickly adaptable as business requirements evolve and data structures and sources change. This delays insights from reaching the business and leaves organizations ill-equipped to support AI. Veeva Nitro is a global solution that meets organizations’ unique regional requirements, including specialized data sources and business processes. Its extensible data model is based on deep industry best practices, while seamless integration with Veeva CRM Suite and Veeva Vault PromoMats automatically syncs all customer activity data and information about a company’s content and its usage into the data warehouse. Also, industry data connectors are capable of bringing together data from the most common sources such as prescription, sales, formulary, and claims data, including regional data from IQVIA and Encise. Veeva Nitro is built on Amazon Redshift — a powerful petabyte-scale data warehouse infrastructure in the cloud — to ensure the highest levels of scalability and fast-query performance even on the largest data sets. Press Release

WCG (WIRB-Copernicus Group) Clinical Services Division announced the opening of the company's new office in Tokyo, Japan. WCG's expanded presence in the Asia-Pacific region will strengthen its ability to support increasingly complex, global clinical trials, particularly in the critical areas of drug and diagnostic development for oncology and central nervous system (CNS) diseases. "WCG's Tokyo office will be home to our Clinical Services Division in Asia, as well as a center of excellence for our growing Patient Engagement Group," said Donald A. Deieso, chairman and CEO of WCG, in a press release. "By expanding WCG's footprint abroad, we are helping to ensure that every trial— especially the most complicated and challenging ones—can benefit from our latest advances in trial optimization, signal detection and patient recruitment." WCG maintains an active presence in 65 countries around the world, helping research sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs) and investigative sites to work together more effectively to conduct faster, safer, and more predictable clinical trials. Press Release

Charles River Laboratories announced the expansion of its service capabilities in early discovery screening. Charles River is the first contract research organization to offer clients access to Apricot Designs' Dual Arm (ADDA) system for high-throughput absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (HT-ADME) to identify potential lead compounds in North America and Europe. Additionally, the Company has geographically expanded its pharmacokinetic (PK) capabilities at sites central to major pharmaceutical and biotechnology hubs. Early screening provides important insight into a compound’s underlying biology, and streamlined HT-ADME and PK technologies are essential components to identifying promising candidates early in the drug discovery process. Press Release

Longeveron announced that it has received a $750,000 grant from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). Longeveron will apply the funding towards its clinical trial examining the safety and efficacy of its allogeneic mesenchymal stem cell (MSCs) product to improve flu vaccine immune-response in elderly patients with frailty. This funded project will be conducted in collaboration with Sean Leng and his research team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHU SOM). "Last year's flu season was one of the worst and deadliest in recent years, and seniors are typically the most vulnerable. Generally, people over 65 have the highest rate of hospitalization for flu. Last year, boomers were affected, too, with people aged 50 to 64 hospitalized at three times the rate of previous seasons, according to CDC data. Regenerative stem cell therapies hold great promise to bolster the immune systems of older people for greater resistance to flu," said Joshua Hare, Longeveron Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, said in a press release. "We are very excited about this great project to test Longeveron's cells clinical capabilities in improving inflammation and immunity," wrote Dan Gincel, Executive Director of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund, in an official statement. "This is an important test of cell therapy technology and may have long term implications in vaccine strategies in older adults." Press Release

proinnovera announced it will carry out its clinical studies with the CTMS system from BSI. With this, proinnovera decides in favor of another efficient and digital tool. proinnovera is characterized by future-oriented and innovative thinking and acting. In order to carry out the studies as conscientiously and efficiently as possible, proinnovera evaluated a Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS). The decision was made in favor of the CTMS solution from BSI Business Systems Integration. Carsten Makus, Director Clinical Operations at proinnovera, who led the evaluation process, commented in a press release: "We have worked with a number of different CTMS products in recent years. Based on this experience, we have now opted for the BSI system as the new standard. The CTMS is clearly structured, user-friendly and above all offers flexibility for further development. Other sponsors and CROs are already working successfully with it." Press Release