Pharsight signs biggest deal in company's history

The contract research organisation has teamed up with an unnamed pharmaceutical company in a multi-quarter agreement, worth approximately $900 000 (€703 000).

The agreement intends to combine Pharsight's Strategic Consulting Services (SCS) expertise and software tools such as Drug Model Explorer (DMX) to "address critical strategic portfolio prioritisation decisions."

"We are seeing a number of large contracts integrating multiple Pharsight software tools and methodologies and this new opportunity is the largest such engagement we have achieved to date,"​ said Shawn O'Connor, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of Pharsight.

"The FDA's call for more modelling and simulation in the Critical Path Initiative and the rising costs of drug development continue to drive adoption of our entire spectrum of tools and services. We believe these trends will lead to future growth, realising the benefits of more and better PK/PD modelling."​

The Critical Path Initiative is FDA's effort to facilitate a national effort to modernise the scientific process through which a potential human drug, biological product, or medical device is transformed from a discovery or "proof of concept" into a medical product.

SCS will apply Pharsight's methodologies for drug-disease modelling and simulation to the client's development compounds and to various existing competitive compounds.

The purpose of this is to understand the likelihood of client drug candidates outperforming competitive drugs.

The results will then be communicated to all members of the development team using Pharsight's web-browser based software tool DMX.

The model-based competitive product analysis can then be used to make "go/no-go" decisions, change development strategy to achieve stronger commercial results and select competitive, appropriate dosage rates earlier in clinical trials.