Increasing the speed of bringing important medicines from the research phase to patients who need them is a driving objective for today’s global biopharmaceutical companies. Covance Inc. one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive drug development companies, is launching Xcellerate, a unique, proprietary methodology designed to help optimize clinical trial performance in order to assist biopharmaceutical companies in improving quality, reducing waste, and decreasing trial timelines – ultimately increasing their return on clinical trial investment.
Specifically, the Xcellerate methodology enables Covance to make custom recommendations on site, investigator and geographic selections for every program it manages, and to help enhance clinical trial design and execution. Xcellerate is not a stand-alone service offering, but is embedded in Covance’s approach to clinical trial management.
“Biopharmaceutical companies have come under increasing pressure in recent years to reduce their R&D spending and re-invigorate their drug development pipelines,” said Rick Cimino, group president, Clinical Development Services, Covance. “We believe that Covance, through Xcellerate, can deliver high value to our clients by improving time-to-market speeds that ultimately should help them bring new medicines to patients faster.”
Xcellerate harnesses the power of the industry’s largest clinical trial knowledgebase, unique data analysis methods, and Covance’s scientific and operational expertise. This can improve the selection of higher performing investigators and sites, more accurately forecast patient enrollment, and more effectively help clients avoid costly delays. Through the application of Xcellerate methodology, companies should experience higher quality and faster delivery with less waste, thereby extracting more value from their clinical investment.
“Similar to the research and development process we manage for our clients, we have developed, tested and refined the Xcellerate methodology over the years and are launching and branding it now as Xcellerate,” said Brett Bishop, vice president, Clinical Trial Design and Strategy, Covance. “As a result, our clients can receive higher quality and more cost-effective results, even in the most competitive and challenging enrollment situations. We intend to continue to add new functionalities to the Xcellerate methodology that further enhance the clinical trial management service we provide our clients.”
Typically in cancer clinical studies across the industry, the number of low and non-enrolling sites (defined as the enrollment of 0 or 1 patient per site) averages approximately 54 percent, which can cost a biopharmaceutical company $50,000 per site. In a cancer study using Xcellerate methodology and a robust dataset, Covance reduced the low and non-performing sites to under 14 per cent for this single portfolio, resulting in significant time and cost savings for the client. Xcellerate also significantly contributed to the recent completion of a portfolio study seven months ahead of its recruitment target date.
Additionally, a long phase III respiratory clinical study with a number of pharmaceutical companies vying for the same patients presented a unique set of challenges to Covance’s client: recruiting patients and retaining investigator and patient interest in the study. Through Xcellerate, Covance was able to help the client finish patient enrollment ahead of target and minimize disruption to investigator sites and their regular activities. This gave the trial a competitive edge in investigator uptake and site enrollment. As a single provider, Covance created synergy across multiple data streams from multiple vendors, helping keep this complex trial on track.
Covance, is one of the world's largest and most comprehensive drug development services companies with annual revenues greater than $ 1.9 billion, global operations in more than 30 countries, and more than 10,000 employees worldwide.