TechTeam was already offering IT and business processing outsourcing services to the pharma industry but is increasing its focus on the sector to capitalise on what it sees as a “tremendous opportunity”.
The unit will now be led at the corporate level and the company is looking to build upon its electronic data capture (EDC), remote data capture (RDC) and eDiary services to increase market share.
Chris Donohue, TechTeam’s corporate vice president and leader of the new business unit, said: "We have proven capabilities and already support some of the top names in this important industry,” adding the company is “investing to add capacity, expand capabilities and to increase our visibility in the market."
TechTeam started this process last year when it established its global pharmaceutical center of excellence, which aims to ensure the quality and continuous improvement of its eClinical support services.
Staff performing these services are trained in pharmaceutical regulatory compliance, clinical trial process and industry standard eClinical applications.
The current suite of services includes multilingual help desk, user and application administration, site assessment, site connectivity, solution provisioning and training.
In addition the new unit will broaden TechTeam’s scope beyond the pharmaceutical industry to cover life sciences as well.
TechTeam claims to be currently supplying technical support for more than 500 clinical trials, in 25 languages, at 25,000 sites around the world.
Prior to the launch of the center of excellence last year TechTeam announced a deal with Sanofi-Aventis R&D, which saw it provide help desk and site provisioning services to the pharma’s clinical trial investigators.