Covance Brings Together Pharma And Biotech To Speed Drug Development
By Ed Miseta, Chief Editor, Clinical Leader
Having the right connections can be critical to any business. In life sciences, having the right connections can make or break a discovery company. For a small biotech firm, standing out in a crowded field of companies attempting to reach pharma partners can be a chore, especially during the early phases of development. With that in mind, Covance has created Covance MarketPlace, a tool designed to help pharma and emerging biotech companies easily and securely forge new partnerships.
Deborah Keller, EVP and group president, R&D Laboratories at Covance, believes the industry’s quest to speed the development and launch of new medicines will require the ability of pharma to locate quality drug candidates effectively and efficiently. Covance MarketPlace was designed to do just that. It will help biotechnology companies showcase their molecules to pharmaceutical companies seeking new molecules. Covance will conduct the development work on the molecules in MarketPlace, which will provide prospective partners with confidence in the quality of the data, the design of the plan, and regulatory acceptance.
“Covance is a trusted partner in the drug development industry,” says Keller. “We have close connections with both the pharmaceutical companies and the smaller biotech firms. This puts us in a perfect position to bring the providers of molecules and the seekers of molecules together. Covance MarketPlace will be a useful solution to both, and provide a safe and effective solution for enhancing the drug discovery process.”
For those biotech companies that have a portfolio of molecules they would like to showcase, MarketPlace is a practical tool to aid in that endeavor. Select pharma partners looking for innovative molecules will now have the ability to connect with those portfolios, as well as the regulatory-compliant data collected by the experienced team of professionals at Covance.
The easy-to-use search functionality in MarketPlace allows pharmaceutical companies to search for innovative molecules using name, description, mechanism of action, phase of development, compound class, and therapeutic area. Only non-confidential information will be shared on the network, and the information will remain invisible to other members listing molecules.
The company is in the process of working with its client base of more than 500 biotechnology companies to place their compounds into Covance MarketPlace. Upon completion, it will be activated for select Covance pharmaceutical clients, giving them line-of-sight to molecules early in their development lifecycle, typically at the IND/CTA-enabling, first-in-human or proof-of- concept phase.