ViS selected to present at TEDMED 2013

WASHINGTON, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- TEDMED's Hive brings together medical innovators who are most likely to impact the future of human health. ViS was selected based on the way it tackles fundamental issues in medical innovation with collaborative approaches.

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Medical innovation relies on clinical research to bring new therapies to patients, but unfortunately, clinical trials have become prohibitively expensive and slow. Today, developing a drug can cost over $1 billion and a single clinical trial can cost more than $100 million. Proper planning of clinical trials is key to the success and efficient use of R&D investments so that new therapies can reach patients.

A key problem in today's clinical research is that trial planners do not have proper analytics about research centers and locations where they operate. Information available is often inaccurate, outdated, or simply non-existent. To find the right centers, across more than 400,000 research centers worldwide, trial planners send out feasibility questionnaires that are often never filled out or returned. There are well over 29,000 clinical trials currently recruiting patients, while only a small percentage of these trials will enroll the minimum number of patients needed for the trial to finish on time. In fact, 50-60% of research sites enroll less than 2 patients in their studies*; about 80% of clinical trials are delayed because of unfulfilled enrollment**; and $10B/year is wasted because of poor site selection.

ViS brings an interactive navigation system to this clinical research universe, so that trial planners can quickly match their needs with the disease-specific capabilities of individual research centers. They can quickly and efficiently evaluate all the relevant disease-specific analytics (such as local patient population, research activity, infrastructure, personnel, timelines, etc.) from the country level through state, city, postal code, all the way down to what is inside the research center facilities.

This information continuum is made possible by ViS' pioneering approach. ViS experts generate analytics relevant to the locations where centers operate, through sophisticated algorithms and semantic technologies. The resulting analytics are validated by local experts and integrated with crowd-sourced input from clinical research centers through ViS' social network, where centers upload their disease-specific profiles.

ViS' collaborative analytics approach integrates large amounts of data to provide up-to-date analytics, while enabling research centers to securely and efficiently showcase their disease-specific capabilities to trial planners. The savings resulting from quick access to better analytics at accessible prices and the efficient communication enabled by ViS' visualization-based social network will likely reduce the waste in today's global clinical research by 10-15%.

ViS founder and CEO Fabio Thiers, MD, PhD, a Harvard/MIT physician-scientist and pioneer in clinical research analytics, points out that "as a result, the overall process becomes much more cost-efficient. Trial planners benefit from a cheaper and better center selection process; research centers gain global exposure, using much less time and resources; and we all benefit from the accelerated development of much needed medicines."

About: The ViS Research Institute was created as a global enterprise in 2010. Its interdisciplinary team interconnects traditional and emerging markets through regional hubs in New York City, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, and Frankfurt am Main.

TEDMED and The Hive take place from April 16-19 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.

For more information, visit our website: www.visresearch.org.

* Pierre, "Recruitment and Retention", 2006;  **Lamberti, "State of Clinical Trials Industry", 292; http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html

SOURCE ViS