Quotient Clinical, a CRO focused on early-stage drug development services, has taken SeaView Research under its operations, thus expanding into the U.S. market.
To Quotient, marching into the U.S. market is part of its key strategy, and since it already has several U.S. customers, having an operation in the country seems to be the natural next step.
“[W]ith the majority of compounds in the industry pipeline originating from U.S. companies, and the majority of early-stage funding directed to the U.S., the U.S. therefore represents an untapped opportunity for Quotient,” said Quotient’s CEO Mark Egerton.
The Nottingham, U.K.-based Quotient was recently listed by The Telegraph as one of the top-growing privately owned British pharmaceutical companies, ranking the ninth.
The CRO has a proprietary Translational Pharmaceutics platform, a drug production system that integrates formulation development, real-time manufacturing and clinical testing at a single location, thus greatly compresses the timelines and costs needed to deliver drug products from the lab to the clinic.
Over 100 leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies have chosen Translational Pharmaceutics to accelerate the development of their products for a variety of indications and routes of delivery, according to a press release put forward by the company. It is planning to replicate that platform at SeaView.
Both companies have a focus on early-stage drug development and have similar capabilities in complex clinical pharmacology services, including first-in-human investigations. But at the same time, SeaView’s clientele has very little overlap with Quotient’s existing one, making the marriage an efficient one in terms of growing customer portfolio, said Egerton.
SeaView, with two clinical pharmacology units located in Miami and Jacksonville, Florida, houses 160 employees and a combined bed capacity of 320. “SeaView also have vast experience in delivering other types of programs, including drug-drug interaction and biosimilar studies that involve larger subject numbers and extended periods of residence—sometimes up to 300 subjects with 30 to 40 days of residence,” Egerton added.
The two will still operate on their own for some time after the acquisition, and all employees and management will remain at their current locations, but Egerton said they will “look to exploit any growth synergies that are relevant for our customers.”
For now, Quotient’s priority is to integrate its data sciences capabilities with SeaView, so that it will be able to deliver full services in the U.K. and the U.S. to the companies’ combined customers.