August 3, 2021 | Parexel acquired by private equity business, American Heart Association seeks genomic diversity, partnerships for Flywheel and HealthMyne as well as Marken and THREAD.

Parexel will be acquired by EQT IX fund and the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management from Pamplona Capital Management LP for $8.5 billion. The transaction is subject to customary conditions, including receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. Evercore acted as the financial advisor to Parexel, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction. Goldman Sachs and Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisors to EQT Private Equity and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction. Press release.

MMS Holdings has announced that its learning arm, MMS Academy, has expanded its global training portfolio with the launch of new courses in inspection readiness and clinical programming. These new courses—created by industry-trained subject matter experts—will give students and working professionals the opportunity to gain the critical knowledge that the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries require. In the 14-week inspection readiness course, students will gain an understanding of global health authority (i.e. FDA, EMA, etc.) inspection processes, targeted industry-specific guidance, and important regulations and guidelines that allow teams to ensure successful regulatory authority inspections. Mini courses are also available, each lasting three to four hours, and have been prepared with consideration for a variety of specific inspection needs, including: remote inspections, regulatory agency and ISO basics, post inspection management, GMP, Sponsor and CRO inspections, and more. Press release. 

The American Heart Association, in the Association's journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, has published a new scientific statement on eliminating barriers to genomic research participation. Genomic studies have produced advances in how to calculate and reduce heart-disease risk, however, the benefits don't necessarily apply to people from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups and Indigenous populations. Efforts must be made to eliminate barriers to increase their participation in genomic research, according to the statement. The statement highlights a need to create new, high-quality, human reference genomes representing more diverse groups of people. This means more people from diverse ethnicities and ancestry are needed to participate in medical research. Paper.

OKRA.ai has announced a collaboration with the AWS for Health initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help rapidly up-skill pharmaceutical companies that are looking to harness technology to engage with physicians and lower the costs of commercializing new treatments. AWS for Health is a new initiative featuring services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for healthcare, biopharma, and genomics. The initiative makes it easier for health customers to select the right tools and partners for their highest-priority workloads across the health communities. Historically, the process of delivering value to physicians and patients has been highly inefficient, based on rigid rules and limited data. However, with the commercial brain built by OKRA.ai, life science companies have been able to connect vast amounts of data and make significant improvements in engaging and communicating with doctors, with agility and scale. The collaboration between OKRA.ai and AWS enables companies to roll out solutions quickly, internationally, and integrated within their existing infrastructure. Press release. 

Konyang University Hospital in Daejeong, South Korea and Molecular Health have signed an agreement such that the hospital will be the first facility in South Korea to use MH Guide in the personalized treatment of its cancer patients. MH Guide is an analysis software that helps molecular pathologists and oncologists interpret NGS data and make treatment decisions. The software automatically detects relevant gene variants from molecular information and identifies treatment options based on the molecular profile and ongoing trials that may be relevant to the patient. To do this, MH Guide matches molecular patient data with data derived from one of the largest growing and Molecular Health- owned knowledge platforms (Dataome). This makes MH Guide an evidence-based decision support tool that enables physicians and molecular pathologists to keep pace with the rapidly growing stock of medical knowledge and make it actionable in treating their patients. Press release.

MMS has been selected by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK)—the UK’s national institute for health data science—as a partner to support the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) initiative. During the pilot phase of the project, MMS will provide flexible service levels based on the capability of each contributor to transform their data to ICODA standards. The MMS biometrics and data science team will provide simple guidance to the full range of data services and data mapping as needed. After the pilot completes, MMS data scientists will use learnings to develop tools to further enable contributors such as open-source code and training that academic researchers can use to transform their own data. Additionally, later phases of the engagement may include data mapping and incorporation of real-world health data. Press release.

Quantum Computing, the leader in bridging the power of classical and quantum computing, is partnering with IPQ Analytics, a life sciences and healthcare analytics innovator that provides a new breed of solutions for improved diagnostics and clinical trial outcomes. Through the partnership, IPQ will analyze real world data to generate novel temporally-defined disease models by combining its unique top-down knowledge graph representation of the patient journey with QCI’s quantum-powered community detection technology. QCI’s QGraph, a component of Qatalyst, empowers drug analysts to solve the most computationally expensive graph problems. The partnership offers IPQ early access to the QDetect community-detection technology of QGraph. The resulting “next generation phenotypes” (NGP) will be used to “re-diagnose” patients in failed clinical trials to identify responsive patient subgroups; optimize payor reimbursement guidelines to reduce unnecessary testing and ineffective patient treatment; and to enhance clinical decision support for earlier, more accurate diagnoses and improved patient management. Press release.

Medable has announced the first stage of its European expansion plans with a new EMEA headquarters in Dublin. The regional headquarters will serve as a hub for expanded sales, customer success and software development in Europe, enabling Medable to continue broad adoption of digital clinical trials at global scale. Medable’s European expansion is designed to enable greater engagement with hundreds of pharma, biotech and medical device companies across the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Benelux. Medable’s European operations will also help the company support clinical trial deployments in Europe, providing remote and site-based access for patients anywhere. Medable’s existing presence in Europe includes roughly 60 employees and contractors currently based in the UK, Germany, Denmark, and various other locations in Central and Eastern Europe. The company intends to hire up to 50 positions in Dublin over the next three years, as part of its extensive growth across Europe in coming years. The company is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland. Press release.

AUI and Accumen are partnering to provide services to improve crisis resilience to manmade and natural disasters for the healthcare sector at a historically challenging time. The new AUI/Accumen partnership is intended to improve healthcare industry safeguards against cybersecurity threats. AUI will play a central role in providing cybersecurity and operational resilience measures in the partnership. Press release.

Albany Molecular Research, Inc. (AMRI), a leading global contract research, development and manufacturing organization serving the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries, has changed its name to Curia, effective July 12, 2021. The new name reinforces the company’s strategic positioning as an end-to-end global CDMO, applying its scientific expertise and extensive capabilities from research and development (R&D) through to commercial manufacturing to enable its pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers to advance important new products that improve lives. Along with the name change, the company is introducing a new brand identity including a new website: CuriaGlobal.com.

Flywheel and HealthMyne will combine the companies’ technologies to accelerate radiomics research and advance clinical trials outcomes for life sciences and clinical research clients. Combining Flywheel’s comprehensive informatics platform with HealthMyne’s artificial-intelligence-enabled radiomics solutions provides an innovative approach for clinical trials and oncology research. The combined platform features an open, extensible architecture to facilitate the automation and streamlining of data curation, quantitative image analysis and radiomic computation. Flywheel provides an end-to-end research workflow solution that helps life sciences, clinical and academic researchers transform productivity, curation, and collaboration with medical research data. HealthMyne’s solution performs radiomic analysis, which is the process of extracting and converting quantitative descriptors of tumor structure and lesion characteristics into mineable data, to support emerging therapy development and response assessment approaches. Together, the combined technologies will enable life sciences companies and researchers to gain a deeper understanding of tumor or lesion response to a specific therapy, acquire new insights to enrich clinical trials and leverage novel data to better personalize treatments for the best patient outcomes. Press release. 

UPS Healthcare's clinical trial logistics unit, Marken, and THREAD, an innovative decentralized clinical trial technology provider, are partnering to bring the first ever, unified, decentralized clinical trial solution into patients' homes. The combined offering brings together THREAD's digital platform and Marken's Home Healthcare and clinical trial logistics services to create a single seamless workflow for clients and patients. Sponsors and clinical research organizations will no longer have to manage individual logistics and decentralized clinical trial platform vendors to set up a study. In addition, patients can easily coordinate all aspects of trial participation, from consent to sample analysis, with a single entity. The modernized workflow and overall integration of Virtual Visit technology with a mobile provider network enables several in-person, coordinated activities that improve the overall experience for the patient, including ease of physical assessments, facilitation of sample and specimen collection, and streamlined UPS Healthcare logistics services. Additionally, the platform includes eConsent, eCOA, telehealth Virtual Visits, patient engagement and eSource, along with other features, to make digital recruitment easier. Integrating these features within one common workflow simplifies the clinical trial study visit to a participant's home, easing the burden for patients and providers. Press release. 

Verantos has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct research and development on real-world evidence (RWE) outcomes. This cooperative agreement will enable accurate identification of clinical outcomes from routinely collected data to further advance RWE. The two-year study will leverage artificial intelligence and data from heterogeneous sources. Support for this new cooperative agreement is provided by the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research Program, under Award Number 2024958. The grant follows Verantos' successful completion of feasibility research under a separate NSF award. Press release.