The growth of outsourcing informatics is driven by a number of factors. The never-ending pressure to speed up drug R&D has forced pharma companies to rely on outside vendors for informatics solutions.
The deal, which is expected to close in late 2005 or early 2006, aims to enable Aptuit to work with InfoPro Solutions to launch the industry's first platform to enable clients to track details of their drug development projects anywhere in the world, in real time.
The terms of the agreement see InfoPro Solutions branded under the name of Aptuit Informatics. The company plans to develop the next generation of IT solutions to meet preclinical and pharmaceutical investigators needs.
The acquisition will also enable Aptuit to provide solutions to small, virtual, and large, global pharmaceutical companies. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
"Our acquisition of InfoPro Solutions will give us the ability to offer customers real time access to data and information addressing an unmet need in drug development," said Michael Griffith, CEO of Aptuit.
As part of the deal, Aptuit will acquire InfoPro Solutions facilities in the US, India, Germany.
"Aptuit shares the view that exchange of data between sponsors, vendors, distributors, investigators, and third party systems as critical to engineering a better drug development process," said Vikram Marla, CEO and founder of InfoPro Solutions.
Marla also said that elements of Aptuit's current software suite, developed by the former Almedica team, might also be incorporated into future Aptuit Informatics platforms.
Customers that are using clinical trial supply chain management tools acquired and transitioned to Aptuit with the company¹s purchase of Almedica International will continue to have access to their existing platforms and resources, and Aptuit will continue to support the former Almedica software and services.
Once Aptuit Informatics' new, end-to-end platform is developed and deployed across all business lines, it will be offered to all customers, along with transitional support.
There has also been an exponential increase of data in which companies are now increasingly relying upon complex IT infrastructure to manage the growing amounts of data.
IBM Life Sciences and Sun Microsystems' Life Sciences are both predicting a rapid increase in scientific information in the near term. Already data is going from terabytes (a trillion) to petabytes (a quadrillion) sooner than in any other industry.
Because the computational requirements of proteomics are orders of magnitude greater than genomics, installation of architectures scaled to petabytes is predicted within the next two to three years.