Accenture Enhances Drug Development from Discovery to Approval with Launch of Accenture Accelerated R&D Services

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) announced today the launch of Accenture Accelerated R&D Services, a business service focused on delivering streamlined and integrated research and development (R&D) functions that will help pharmaceutical companies bring new medications to patients using a more collaborative and efficient approach. Accenture is investing more than $200 million to deliver this fully-integrated, technology-enabled global business service that will drive more efficient and effective development of pharmaceutical products for clients.

Accelerated R&D Services will leverage capabilities of the cloud, mobility and analytics to deliver integrated functions across clinical development, regulatory submissions, pharmacovigilance and market launch predicated on delivering better patient outcomes. Accelerated R&D Services helps life sciences companies bring drugs to market faster, at less cost and with reduced execution risks using a pay-for-performance business model for business process outsourcing. The business service encompasses:

• Clinical services that focus on the traditional “pain points” of effectively identifying the right patients, helping efficient capture of clinical trial data and streamlining the process between data capture and reporting by leveraging the latest Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) criteria.
• Pharmacovigilance services leveraging mobile and web-based data capture to drive compliance with new regulations to increase productivity and improve quality in the pharmacovigilance processes.
• Integrated cloud-based regulatory services leveraging CDISC standards and the industry’s integrated cloud-based processing platform to improve regulatory quality, speed and operational efficiency.

“An industry demand exists for new benchmarks that are driven by increasingly stringent health authority requirements, unsustainable fixed-cost models, and the complexity of managing numerous vendor partners and technology systems,” said David Boath, senior managing director, Life Sciences Accelerated R&D Services, Accenture. “With R&D Accelerated Services, we offer an improved and advanced type of service focused on efficiency, effectiveness and modern processes leveraging digital, the cloud and end-to-end solutions that draw on the management consulting, technology and outsourcing skills of our people.

“Accenture’s acquisition of Octagon Research Solutions, Inc., our current market leadership in clinical and pharmacovigilance operations as evidenced by a recent IDC Health Insights Drug Safety Services assessment¹, and our collaboration with market-leading companies that specialize in developing cloud-based solutions and managing compliance requirements needed to address functions through the clinical development are examples of how we are using our strategic and targeted investment strategy to grow this business and help our clients focus on the science of new products.

“Further evidence of our dedication in improving end-to-end efficiencies across the R&D lifecycle is Accenture’s established global scale and reach. This is reinforced by thousands of R&D professionals many with advanced academic degrees and an average of 15 years of industry experience.”

Supporting the strategic R&D initiatives of more than 300 clients, Accenture is working with a leading pharmaceutical company to build a first-of-its kind clinical data aggregation and exchange platform. Intended to accelerate clinical development, the cloud-based platform capitalizes on industry standards such as CDISC and provides access to standardized and aggregated clinical trial data to improve external collaboration, reinvigorate innovation and provide better insights from data.

In efforts to improve patient safety, Accenture is collaborating with a global pharmaceutical company to design and develop its advanced patient safety information solutions that would limit the need for expensive manual reporting via call centers.

Accenture is working with key associations such as CDISC and Transcelerate BioPharma to advance industry-wide clinical data standards, streamline research processes and encourage the discovery of new medicines for patients by pharmaceutical and biotechnology research companies.

Learn more about Accenture Accelerated R&D Services.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 266,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

¹IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Life Science Drug Safety Services 2013 Vendor Assessment, doc #HI239221, February 2013. Click here to access the full report.