Partnership Aims To Enhance Precision and Reduce High Failure Rates in Central Nervous System Clinical Trials



Dublin, Ireland and Hamilton, New Jersey, March 16, 2009-ICON (NASDAQ: ICLR) (ISIN:IE0005711209), a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries and MedAvante, Inc. the leader in centralised psychiatric patient evaluation, today announced that they have signed an alliance agreement. This agreement will couple ICON’s global reach and proven excellence in clinical trial management with MedAvante’s innovative platform to centralise and calibrate the assessment of patients undergoing treatment in clinical trials. As a result, pharmaceutical and biotechnology trial sponsors will be able to reliably and precisely measure patients’ response to therapies.
 
“MedAvante has developed a platform that addresses a major cause of clinical trial failure in Central Nervous System (CNS) development: variability in both clinical diagnosis of the disorder being studied and ongoing  assessment of the severity of the patient’s symptoms in a consistent and standardised fashion,” says Dr. John Hubbard, President, ICON Clinical Research. “ICON is constantly striving to offer our pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners innovative clinical trial solutions to enhance the drug development process.”  

“ICON is a proven leader in the provision of high quality clinical research services,” says Paul Gilbert, Chief Executive Officer of MedAvante. “This alliance extends our ability to offer our services across the industry and across the globe. Most importantly, however, is what this alliance provides to CNS drug developers: The ability on a larger scale to reduce the high rate of failed CNS clinical trials which the industry recognises as unacceptable in terms of cost and lost time.”




ICON plc is a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. The Company specializes in the strategic development, management and analysis of programs that support clinical development - from compound selection to Phase I-IV clinical studies. With headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, ICON currently, operates from 71 locations in 38 countries and has approximately 7,000 employees. Further information is available at 


MedAvante is a global provider of centralised expert psychological rating services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. MedAvante is a pioneer in developing a solution for one of the most intractable problems in CNS clinical trials: the high rate of uninformative or failed studies. MedAvante applies unique methods to systematically remove potential sources of bias and variability from the assessment process. By centralising assessments with expert, standardised, objective, clinical interviewers over MedAvante’s 2-way, real-time, high quality video-conferencing, MedAvante makes subjective assessments of drug efficacy increasingly objective. As a result, sponsors can achieve increased study power and reduced trial-failure rates, enabling them to bring more effective CNS drugs to market sooner. MedAvante operates facilities in Hamilton, NJ; Los Angeles, CA; and Madison, WI. For more information about MedAvante, 