Canadian Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion Mary Ng recently announced the investment in Everest Clinical Research through the Women Entrepreneurship Fund (WEF).
Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with offices in Little Falls, NJ and Shanghai, China, the contract research organization (CRO) provides services to more than 60 pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical devices clients.
The company will use the funds to develop a new data analytics and visualization dashboard application for managing data from clinical research trial sites.
Said Jin Dai, Everest Clinical Research, senior director, business planning and operations: “Funds will be used for the functional and technical staff required to design and build a working version of the product, as well as the underlying IT infrastructure the solution will be internally hosted on.”
The investment may also be used to bring in external user interface (UI) design expertise if needed, Dai told us.
“Clinical trials require the use of multiple and typically disparate technologies and data collection systems throughout the conduct of the trial,” he added.
“If the data from all these sources can be aggregated, analyzed, and reported on in a centralized portal, with intelligent analytics that help identify risks and opportunities to enable a more efficient, effective and safe trial, this can be of great benefit to trial sponsors and the various partners that help execute the trial.”
As Dai explained, the dashboard looks to streamline processes, adding value via custom algorithms to help identify and predict areas of risk.
The company has already designed a prototype, he said. Next steps include cross-functional design sessions to develop the lower level functional and technical specifications as well as database design.
A live product is targeted for release at the end of Q1 2020, with one of two ‘anchor’ clients forming a pilot group.
