Continuing its shift from transactional relationships towards strategic alliances with clients, ICON has been selected by Roche as technology partner for storing and managing medical images collected during the pharmaceutical company’s clinical research programmes.
Following a one-year pilot programme, Roche has committed to using ICON’s MIRA (Medical Image Review and Analysis) software as its central online repository for medical images. It is the first company to do so, according to the global provider of outsourced development services based in Ireland.
MIRA is the core application employed in its daily operations by ICON Medical Imaging, with functionality for imaging and clinical data management, image analysis, project management and document management.
Roche is implementing MIRA in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which gives the company 24/7 access to imaging data from anywhere in the world and eliminates the technology costs associated with purchasing and maintaining an image-management system in house.
SaaS solution
ICON says it is the first medical imaging provider to offer clients a SaaS solution for their image-management needs.
“MIRA’s superior imaging capabilities, and fault tolerance mechanisms, made it an ideal solution to offer clients in a SaaS framework,” commented Andrew Kraus, executive vice president and chief technology officer at ICON Medical Imaging.
Dr.Gudrun Zahlman, leader for imaging infrastructure at Roche cited the “comprehensive functionality” of MIRA, redundancy (i.e., duplication) of the imaging data in the European Union and United States, and the “responsive nature of the ICON staff” as decisive factors in sealing the partnership.
In addition, Roche has achieved “seamless integration” of images hosted in MIRA with the company’s clinical data repository and data-mining tools for decision-making in clinical trials. It has also integrated third-party image-analysis software within MIRA for quantitative biomarker research.
“Today’s announcement is another good example of the innovation that ICON is bringing to the drug development process and we look forward to building on our close technology partnership with Roche,” Kraus added.
