Are your suppliers compliant? Many don’t know, says Science Exchange CEO

13-Dec-2017 - Last updated on 13-Dec-2017 at 20:38 GMT

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Only eight of the top 40 CROs are Privacy Shield Framework-certified, says Science Exchange CEO as the company continues to rack up partnerships with pharma companies looking to streamline outsourcing efforts and mitigate risk.

Science Exchange is an enterprise platform and aggregator for outsourced research and development (R&D). The company’s platform provides access to more than 6,000 scientific services from 2,500 contract research organizations (CROs), academic labs, and government facilities.

Elizabeth Iorns, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Science Exchange told us that the company’s core competitive offering is its ability to provide rapid access to innovation and to mitigate compliance risks associated with working with external partners.

“Specialization has driven a need to work with many different specialists outside your own company, of which many of them are actually located at these CROs and CMOs [contract manufacturing organizations] rather than inside the pharmaceutical companies,” said Iorns.

Are your suppliers compliant?

Iorns explained that many companies don’t know the answer to this question – which will become a huge challenge from a risk mitigation perspective in May of next year as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) take effect.

Companies who have earned Privacy Shield certification, which replaces the EU-US Safe Harbor program, will be considered to be GDPR-compliant.

Any companies that are not in compliance will be subject to fines of 4% of their revenues.

Currently, Iorns said only eight of the top 40 CROs are Privacy Shield Framework-certified. “There’s definitely a big gap there,” she said. “By using Science Exchange, [companies can] completely eliminate that risk.”

Partnering with customers and suppliers

The Palo Alto, CA-headquartered company has raised more than $58m, including a $28m Series C funding round completed in June, since being founded in 2011, and has announced several new partnerships with organizations – both customers and suppliers.

Alector is among the latest to partner with Science Exchange and joins more than 30 enterprise organizations, including 10 of the top 20 pharma companies that use the platform.

The company also recently announced a partnership with Bioinformatics Solutions, which will offer its protein de novo sequencing services to Science Exchange users.