Porsolt aims to win over US clients with new research centre
Services offered at the CRO’s new facility in San Antonio, Texas, set to open in late October, will centre on the preclinical evaluation of NCEs for abuse dependence liability exclusively in primates, whilst cohering with those provided by the parent company, headquartered in France where trials are conducted on rats and mice.
Whilst concentrating on drug abuse and dependence, the company also plan to extend its research to other medical areas including cognition, pain, inflammation, schizophrenia, diabetes, obesity, respiration and cardiovascular pharmacology.
Dr. Mark Duxon, CEO of Porsolt, told Outsourcing-Pharma that the increasing stringency of safety pharmacology assessment in trials compels clients to demand “more rigorous guarantees for confidentiality, closer control over the planning and execution of experiments, and higher levels of quality control, in particular, compliance with international standards of Good Laboratory Practice (GLP).”
He believes Porsolt is in a better position to satisfy these needs by conducting studies in its new state-of-the-art 300m2 facility – a premises rented by the University of Texas Health Science Centre, who regularly consult with Porsolt - which he company plan to extend to 600m2.
Cognition evaluation in primates
The facility will house all of the apparatus and instrumentation necessary for conducting experiments on self-administration, along with systems for evaluating cognition in primates (CANTAB), and telemetric devices for measuring respiratory and cardiovascular function.
During 2008 and 2009, the company fought hard to survive a dip in sales and revenue caused by the harsh economic downturn, and found that 85 per cent of its revenue is drawn from clients outside of France, 30 per cent of which coming from North American customers.
“Clear interest in Porsolt’s services has sometimes been hampered by reticence in conferring work to a French-based operation,” commented Duxon. “This has been particularly true in Porsolt’s past contacts with US public bodies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”
“Porsolt expects that clients who have received satisfaction for work performed on one site will tend naturally to confer different work to the other site, provided the same standards of quality are maintained,” said Duxon optimistically.
