Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, has announced that it and clinical research organization (CRO) Parexel are extending their strategic partnership, which has gone on for 15 years prior to now. The collaboration will work toward “pioneering a new era of decentralized clinical trial technology.”
Additionally, Parexel participates in Medidata’s Early Adopter DCT program, which leverages the myMedidata patient portal, Sensor Cloud, and Medidata’s proprietary Patient Centricity by Design program; Parexel, in turn, provides feedback and insights to help ensure the portal meets the needs of patients, sites, and sponsors. myMedidata enables study patients to access their trial needs virtually via a web-based portal.
To learn more about the history and future of the collaboration between the two companies, Outsourcing-Pharma connected with two executives:
- Anthony Costello, patient cloud CEO with Medidata
- Clare Grace, chief patient officer at Parexel
OSP: Could you please share how Parexel and Medidata came to work together, and why the partnership has worked so well for so long?
AC: Our relationship with Parexel has been growing and developing for more than a decade now. As a world-leading CRO, Parexel was seeking partners that had state-of-the-art systems to collect data from clinical trials in an efficient, regulatory-approved manner that would easily meet all patient safety and privacy requirements.
While Parexel’s relationship with Medidata was born through the use of electronic data capture (EDC); we have continued to strengthen our partnership through more patient-centric solutions that continue to enhance Parexel’s services delivering better clinical trials for sponsors and patients.
OSP: Do you have any notable achievements born out of the long-running partnership that you’d like to brag about?
AC: In early February we announced an extension of our 15-year global strategic partnership to enhance the delivery of decentralized clinical trials. Parexel is also the largest CRO to be part of the Early Adopter Program for myMedidata, a web-based patient portal enabling decentralized clinical trials. Alternatively, another notable achievement is Parexel’s global use of Medidata’s Rave Site Payments solution to support all sites and investigator payments.
OSP: Both companies mention work about DCTs—could you please share any specific plans or goals the collaborators have about DCT development?
CG: Clare Grace: As Anthony mentioned earlier, Parexel is the largest CRO that participated in the myMedidata Early Adopter Program. The program enabled us to provide input into the development of the platform with the ability to offer direct feedback into the functionality, usability, and development of the patient engagement interface of the solution. Within this program, Parexel is also supporting testing and validation myMedidata for use in DCTs.
Over the long term, our partnership with Medidata is an opportunity to enhance our patient-first efforts in clinical trials, especially around DCT and hybrid studies.
