US-based biopharmaceutical services company Quintiles Transnational has further expanded its global Prime Site programme, forming a partnership with Arizona State University (ASU) in the US.
The Center for Healthcare Innovation & Clinical Trials at ASU – part of the College of Nursing & Health Innovation – becomes the latest Quintiles Prime Site following partnerships with the California Permanente Medical Group of Kaiser Permanente and Washington Hospital Center in the US, the University of Pretoria in South Africa, Queen Mary’s College, London in the UK and the University of Malaya in Malaysia.
Prime Sites are large medical institutions that collaborate with Quintiles to enhance their infrastructure for conducting clinical trials. The ASU unit is the only one of Quintiles’ Prime Sites that is a community-based, non-academic medical centre, the College of Nursing & Health Innovation noted.
The partnership with Quintiles will boost the Center for Healthcare Innovation & Clinical Trials’ access to clinical research initiatives, the College said. In turn, ASU will use its existing community-based model, the Community Oriented Network to Enhance Clinical Trials and Research (CONECTR), to recruit more physicians and nurse practitioners who can identify patients willing and eligible to participate in studies.
Aligning clinical research pipeline opportunities with local investigators according to their capabilities, CONECTR will serve as a hub for placing, sub-contracting, supporting and consulting on multi-phase research studies in Arizona.
As Linda Mottle, director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation & Clinical Trials, pointed out, clinical research in Arizona currently lags behind other US states with comparable sizes of population. “We believe our community-based model can substantially increase the clinical research market in Arizona,” she commented.
“Access to patients is one of the toughest hurdles in working with our biopharmaceutical customers to accelerate outcomes and get better value from the drug development process,” added Adam Chasse, senior director for patient access at Quintiles.
“This agreement with ASU will help our customers to meet study milestones more effectively by providing access to large groups of physicians … who are interested in participating in clinical research and who treat large groups of patients.”
