Danbury colossus tracks drug sales, and absorbs sting of clinical defeat
On a conference call in early May, Ari Bousbib had at hand the latest statistical report on new pharmaceuticals in development as tracked by his IQVIA, whose researchers counted record numbers of new treatments approved last year by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
The same IQVIA study found a drop in success rates for new drugs getting into the hands of patients that need them — with Bousbib’s colossus experiencing secondhand the sting of failure when hopes are dashed in the lab for millions of people in the U.S. and globally.
Formed in the fall of 2016 in the merger of prescription drug market analyst IMS Health and the outsourced lab services giant Quintiles, IQVIA is Connecticut’s quiet giant of the life sciences industry.
It trails only Pfizer and Medtronic for global headcount among companies with major operations in the state.
IQVIA employs thousands more people than Boehringer Ingelheim, which has its U.S. headquarters in Ridgefield, less than a mile from IQVIA’s offices in the Lee Farm Corporate Park.
Bousbib led IMS through the merger and remains chairman and CEO of IQVIA today, with the company maintaining dual headquarters in Danbury and Durham, N.C. where Quintiles was based.
Before getting the top job with IMS, Bousbib spent 14 years with United Technologies, including as president leading Otis Elevator, based in Farmington alongside UTC.
On May 1, Bousbib reviewed IQVIA’s progress to date this year, with the company earning $58 million in the first quarter as revenue rose 5 percent to nearly $2.7 billion.
IQVIA reported that its future project backlog would take a $390 million hit, however, due to a client ending a significant drug trial.
While IQVIA has not revealed the name of the client, some analysts believe it to be Biogen, with which Quintiles has partnered for years in clinical development.
In March, Biogen announced it had tabled a treatment under development for Alzheimer’s disease, causing its stock to shed $18 billion in value in a single day.
‘Devastating news for the people’
Bousbib said nothing
Wednesday to dispel the assumption of IQVIA’s involvement supporting clinical research efforts for the drug under development, telling investment analysts “we all know which trial we’re talking about” but quickly putting the development into a human context.
“No one had absolutely any idea that this study (would) be terminated,” Bousbib said. “This was devastating news for the industry — for the people — who have been dedicating their lives to try to find a solution to this terrible disease; and most of all for the patients that ... have very high hopes.”
In a January research note, Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Jones described IQVIA as “best positioned” among the contract research organizations with which it competes, with regard to avoiding a concentration of revenue with any single customer that could impede significantly IQVIA’s growth momentum.
CROs help support the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries with research
services.
“The CRO (contract research organization) market is growing steadily as companies outsource production of medicine as well as clinical trials,” stated Dawn Hocevar, CEO of the BioCT trade organization. “There are several CROs in (Connecticut) with varying breadth of services.”
Earlier this year, IQVIA diversified further with the creation of a new division to focus on assisting biotechnology startups in the drug development process.
In a separate analysis that same month, Jefferies analyst David Windley highlighted both IQVIA and its Princeton, N.J.based rival Covance among companies best positioned to benefit, as more research work flows to companies that take on pharmaceutical development services on an outsourced basis.
The list of contract research competitors includes Parexel based outside Boston; and PRA Health Sciences and Syneos Health, both close to IQVIA’s North Carolina operations.
“IQVIA has done a commendable job of ... managing project delivery through operational and cultural integration,” Windley wrote, highlighting the company’s sales and development
efforts.
Hundreds of millions of anonymous records
Any number more labs perform contract research work for life sciences innovators, including academic centers like Yale University and the University of Connecticut, and smaller entities like Arvys Proteins in Trumbull and Hyprocell in Branford.
The roots of the industry date back to the formation of animal testing companies like Charles River Laboratories in Massachusetts after World War II; with 1982 a milestone year with the formation of Quintiles and Parexel.
When it was founded in 1998, IMS Health traced its corporate antecedents back 44 years to Intercontinental Marketing Services, established by the onetime New York City advertising agency L.W. Frolich Intercon International which began collecting market research on new drugs in order to better frame ad campaigns for industry clients.
IMS would eventually be folded into the business data giant Dun & Bradstreet, then spun off in 1996 as part of Cognizant which within two years would split off IMS and Nielsen Media Services, the latter
maintaining to this day corporate offices in Wilton and New York City.
IMS has a link to another major local employer in Gartner, with Cognizant having held nearly half of the shares of the Stamfordbased company that has come to be a dominant player in its own niche tracking information technology trends.
Employing 8,000 people in 90 countries from the outset of its Cognizant spinoff, IMS began its corporate arc in the Nyala Farms complex of Westport, later moving its headquarters to the Towers complex building that today houses GE Capital. Going public in 2014, IMS landed in Danbury’s Lee Farm on a hill overlooking the city’s airport.
In April, the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science published estimates that estimated at 11 percent
the odds that a drug entering clinical development would get into the hands of patients, down from 14 percent the year before.
Like others in the industry, IQVIA is aiming to improve those odds in part by intensifying its efforts to drill new artificial intelligence tools into the drug development process, including a new platform that gleans genomic data from clinical trials while maintaining the anonymity of the patients themselves — a major speed bump in the past given increased privacy concerns and regulations.
IQVIA gleans its data from more than 600 million patient records globally that are not linked to people’s identities.
The company’s data vaults represent a valuable trove for the life sciences industry, helping lab researchers connect the scientific dots in developing new treatments, to tracking prescription trends on 85 percent of global drug sales.
On Wednesday, Bousbib said clinical trials are being transformed by the application of artificial intelligence to all that data IMS and Quintiles have accumulated, first separately and then as IQVIA.
And he noted that despite the failed drug trial, IQVIA’s backlog increased to nearly $5 billion of anticipated work that will convert to revenue in the coming year.
“These things can’t happen in a vacuum — you need the raw ingredients, which is the deep granular patient level analytics assets that we’ve spent decades building,” Bousbib said.