Portal propels clinical trials at Covance

Enterprise portal software is being used as the foundation for an integrated application platform for worldwide operations of Covance Clinical Development group.

Covance, a drug development services company headquartered in Princeton, NJ, has selected Sybase Enterprise Portal to consolidate all of its structured and unstructured data into a single point of reference. It also will supply near real-time access to clinical trial data and trial management information to Covance’s clinical trial project teams.

Within Covance’s Clinical Development group, an average of 200 separate clinical trials are running at any one time, with the data coming from multiple sources--including Lotus Notes, Oracle and Sybase databases--and from unstructured data sources like Excel and Word from Microsoft. The software provides an architecture that will consolidate information from all of those sources into a single point of reference through a Web browser, thereby improving processes for clinical trial teams.

Explaining that Sybase was chosen for its open architecture and integration capability, Rich Enz, senior director of Clinical Information Technology for Clinical Development operations at Covance, adds, “This new relationship is intended to enable Covance to manage clinical trials more efficiently.”

Haridas Nair, director of product marketing for Sybase’s Enterprise Portal, says that the product will provide Covance with “three key elements that will be crucial to its trial content management via the Web--security, process flow and integration.”

With pro forma revenues of $737 million in 2000, Covance operates in 17 countries and has approximately 7,200 employees worldwide.

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