IBM To Acquire Merge for $1 Billion
IBM’s announcement that it is acquiring Merge, includes the eClinical assets of the company. While IBM led that its Watson Health platform be enhanced with data and images obtained from Merge’s medical imaging management platform, enabling Watson to “see” in an effort to unlock the value of medical images to help physicians make better patient care decisions, its press release mentioned other capabilities that IBM will gain. IBM’s Watson Health unit plans to bring together Merge’s product and solution offerings with existing expertise in cognitive computing, population health, and cloud-based healthcare intelligence offerings to:
- Offer researchers insights to aid clinical trial design, monitoring and evaluation;
- Help clinicians to efficiently identify options for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring a broad array of health conditions such as cancer, stroke and heart disease;
- Enable providers and payers to integrate and optimize patient engagement in alignment with meaningful use and value-based care guidelines; and
- Support researchers and healthcare professionals as they advance the emerging discipline of population health, which aims to optimize an individual’s care by identifying trends in large numbers of people with similar health status.
Read the full release.
FDA Outlines Updated Requirement for Placebo-Controlled Trials in Vaccine Research
May 21st 2025In an article recently published by The New England Journal of Medicine, FDA higher-ups Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH; and Martin A. Makary, MD, MPH, wrote that any new COVID-19 vaccine must now be evaluated in placebo-controlled studies.
Unifying Industry to Better Understand GCP Guidance
May 7th 2025In this episode of the Applied Clinical Trials Podcast, David Nickerson, head of clinical quality management at EMD Serono; and Arlene Lee, director of product management, data quality & risk management solutions at Medidata, discuss the newest ICH E6(R3) GCP guidelines as well as how TransCelerate and ACRO have partnered to help stakeholders better acclimate to these guidelines.
Full Phase IIIb BATURA Trial Results Show Airsupra Cuts Severe Exacerbations by 47% in Mild Asthma
May 20th 2025Results from the pivotal BATURA trial show that Airsupra (albuterol/budesonide) significantly outperformed albuterol monotherapy in reducing severe asthma exacerbations and systemic corticosteroid exposure, reinforcing its role as a next-generation, anti-inflammatory rescue therapy for mild asthma patients.
