Cognizant is providing AstraZeneca with statistical analysis, medical writing and other services. By outsourcing these tasks to Cognizant AstraZeneca hopes to cut cycle times and focus its efforts on other aspects of clinical development.
Karin Wingstrand, vice president and head of clinical development at AstraZeneca, said: “Cognizant will help us streamline our clinical development operations. This is key to our business transformation aimed at achieving greater efficiency, agility, flexibility, and global competitiveness.”
Cognizant will use its web-based collaboration platform to manage each region of a global clinical trial simultaneously. Using the platform, called Cognizant 2.0, is intended to enable sharing of information between these teams.
Krish Venkat, senior vice president at Cognizant, said: “[We’ll] support AstraZeneca through improved decision-making, process standardisation, consistency of delivery, and cost savings, which they can reinvest to support the fast, innovative, and efficient development of their R&D programmes.”
AstraZeneca will keep scientific and medical activities associated with clinical trial programme design and data interpretation. By focusing time and investment on these high-skilled tasks AstraZeneca hopes to improve its clinical development programmes.
Relationship growth
Cognizant began working with AstraZeneca in 2004, offering business process services from discovery through to commercial operations, and expanded the relationship four years later. The 2008 deal added centralised data management services for AstraZeneca’s global clinical development projects.
In fiscal 2010 the healthcare business segment, which includes the life sciences unit, accounted for one-quarter of revenues at Cognizant. Sales at the segment were up 37 per cent year-on-year. Cognizant said expanding relationships with existing clients drove much of the upswing.
Cognizant inked a multi-year deal with Eli Lilly in January. The agreement saw Lilly outsource US sales and marketing support work, such as commercial analytics and data warehousing, to Cognizant.