Quintiles Founder Dennis Gillings, CBE, has received the SCRIP Lifetime Achievement Award and the company also bagged the ‘CRO of the Year’ at the 2012 SCRIP Awards in London.

The SCRIP Awards acknowledge excellence in the biopharmaceutical industry, based on judging by an independent panel of 16 life sciences experts. The 8th annual awards ceremony, held on November 28, 2012 at The Lancaster hotel in London, was attended by more than 500 global industry leaders.

Being named CRO of the Year is a prestigious honour for Quintiles, the world’s leading provider of biopharmaceutical services. It is one of the most competitive awards bestowed by SCRIP, and Quintiles has received it three times in the past four years.

“Scrip’s Lifetime Achievement Award is reserved for an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the pharmaceutical/biotech industry. In founding Quintiles, Dennis Gillings made an indelible impact on drug development by pioneering the Clinical Research Organisation industry, revolutionizing the field to the extent that clinical trials expertise now rests with these companies. The CRO sector is still fast growing and plays a crucial role in drug development,” said Mike Ward, chief content officer for Datamonitor Healthcare and Scrip Intelligence.

“I am honoured to receive this award. During these past three decades, many diseases have gone from being life threatening to manageable, thanks to the work we have done with our biopharmaceutical customers,” said Dr Gillings.

Dr Gillings has invested his 40-plus year career working to improve health around the world, beginning in 1971 as a professor of biostatistics at the University of North Carolina. In April 2012, he stepped away from the day-to-day operations of Quintiles but continues to serve as its executive chairman. Today, Quintiles is the largest global provider of services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.

Under Dr Gillings’ leadership, Quintiles helped develop or commercialize all of 2011’s top 50 best-selling products or compounds, top 30 best-selling cardiovascular products or compounds, and top 40 best-selling oncology products or compounds.