Size matters

Executives of the two companies have known each other for many years. As a combined entity, the 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.

McMullen, who has more than 40 years of experience in the drug development industry, added in a news release about the deal that “This merger will bring together two of the industry’s most experienced providers of specialized 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.”

“Bioclinica has been a leading global provider of integrated, technology-enhanced clinical trial management services and the dominant player in the medical imaging space,” Weinstein tells DDNews. “This was the right thing to happen in order to consolidate from an efficiency standpoint and broaden the scope of the business to provide all of the specialty services that pharmaceutical companies need. Size does matter.”

BioClinica maintains that its 2013 merger with CoreLab Partners has created a new standard in imaging core lab services including electronic transfer, management and independent review; cardiovascular safety monitoring including automated ECG, thorough QT studies, Holter monitoring, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and pulse wave analysis; and eClinical solutions for electronic data capture, randomization, clinical trial management and clinical supply chain forecasting and optimization. The company operates state-of-the-art, regulatory-body-compliant imaging core labs on two continents, and supports worldwide comprehensive cardiovascular safety and eClinical and data management services.

CCBR-SYNARC is a highly specialized provider of clinical services to the world’s largest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Its SYNARC business specializes in imaging services, consultation and analysis to track progress throughout a clinical trial’s life cycle, and its CCBR business has 26 clinical centers located around the world to recruit patients for trials conducted in those centers.

As one company, BioClinica and CCBR-SYNARC expect to become the market-leading provider of four highly specialized 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 centers dedicated to recruiting patients for global trials. It will enable state-of-the-art technology and consulting services to support the overall drug development process, as well as services to monitor the cardiac safety of compounds under development. Additionally, it will provide central lab capabilities to analyze biological samples originating from clinical trials.

This merger comes at a time when demand for outsourced pharmaceutical services is projected to grow more than 5 percent per year over the next five years. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly turning to specialists to help them manage their drug development processes.

Together, BioClinica and CCBR-SYNARC will serve the world’s leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies through board-certified oncologists, radiologists, cardiologists and medical researchers located in centers throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. With nearly 50 years of combined experience, BioClinica and CCBR-SYNARC have completed more than 5,000 clinical trials to support customers with introducing new medicines across key therapeutic areas.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014. Financial terms are not being disclosed.

“The advantage of this merger is that we are adding pieces instead of just combining companies,” Weinstein says. “We will be able to run the same platform across an entire company’s set of studies, maintain it throughout a lengthy study and develop synergy as we grow.”

“On a combined basis, we expect to have revenues of more than $200 million,” he adds. “Together, we deal with the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and run 600 studies at a time.”