ViS Research

ViS Research, Inc.
Company type	Incorporated
Industry	Clinical Research Analytics technology ; Information Technology ; Analytics
Founded	New York City, USA (2010)
Founder	Fabio Thiers, MD, PhD ; Romero Tavares
Headquarters	32 W 86th St, New York, NY, United States
Number of locations	United States; Brazil; Germany; India
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Fabio Thiers (CEO); Richard Kivel (COO); Gustavo Kesselring (Executive Director LATAM); Dan Martines (CIO); Chuck Swanson (Head of Sales); Marc Wilenzick (Head of Stakeholder Engagement); James Rosenstein (Head of Global Communications); Johanna Schenk (Executive Director Europe); Jatin Shah (Executive Director Asia)
Products	Location Analytics ; Center Analytics ; Analytics Services
Number of employees	50+ (April 1, 2013)
Website	www.visresearch.com

ViS Research is an American-based, multinational company that optimizes clinical trial planning through a structured, online feasibility platform. The platform provides tools and analytics to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and contract research organizations that transform how locations, research centers and investigators are evaluated for inclusion in clinical trials.

All the multi-dimensional inputs are integrated and made easily accessible through novel visualization methods. At the same time, ViS enables research centers to create an online profile, which answers over 85 percent of questions raised in feasibility assessments. Networking tools facilitate communication and engagement between trial planners and centers. The ViS platform is transforming the feasibility process using the same web technologies that have transformed the consumer web.

Overview

ViS' online feasibility platform streamlines the process of finding and assessing researchers and research centers for clinical trials, using public and private data together with advanced analytics. The platform uses an intuitive, highly navigable, graphical interface to facilitate finding active research centers in a given therapeutic area, at the country, state, city, or postal code level. The ViS platform also allows research centers to provide technical information about their expertise and internal capabilities in conducting trials within specific disease areas, and networking features enable trial planners and research centers to connect immediately. One of the main benefits of the platform is that it obviates the need for repetitive and cumbersome feasibility questionnaires. Headquartered in New York City, ViS has offices in Brazil, Germany and India.

ViS provides up-to-date, advanced analytics on clinical research infrastructure and personnel, individual research centers, investigator profiles, curated patient demographics, and public and private research center networks. Examples include information about ongoing trials, number of trials per center, available patients, and patient engagement levels (number of patients enrolled in clinical research per 100,000 patients in a city or location). Individual trial centers can display information about their expertise and capabilities, including detailed information about their research staff, aggregate patient demographics, infrastructure, capabilities and research, as part of their ViS profile. ViS Profile (example)

File:ViS Research Analytics example.png

Novel location analytics showing the number of trials at site-level and growth rate for all diseases in the top 50 countries.

ViS' analytics cover over 400,000 disease-specific research sites. A key feature is the novel combination of location analytics compiled by ViS (i.e. aggregate patient demographics and trial engagement metrics) with site-specific data provided by the Research Centers.

ViS integrates information from three primary data sources, through collaborative analytics: internal research, research sites and investigators, and 3rd party data. The company uses parsing algorithms, natural language processing, and pattern recognition to curate and harmonize data from public and private sources. All information is then continuously harmonized and integrated using proprietary semantic technologies to generate disease-specific analytics. The data is then geo-referenced and integrated with crowd-sourced inputs from individual research centers.^[1] In January 2014, InVentiv Health Clinical, a leading drug developer, reported that it had analyzed data from 100 feasibility studies to determine the value of using ViS analytics for trial feasibility. According to Inventiv, its assessment of ViS's platform showed a reduction in "mean feasibility time by 54%. Inventiv's Senior Vice-President and General Manager of its Clinical Trial Recruitment Services noted that its leveraging of the efficiencies were expected to continue, noting that "[i]n the next phase of development on the ViS platform we'll accelerate [our feasibility] processes even more." ^[2]

Users of ViS' collaborative analytics include pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and diagnostic companies, academic and government institutions, contract research organizations (CROs) and other organizations around the world engaged in clinical trials.

ViS was featured at TedMed in April 2013 as part of the Hive.^[3]^[4]

On May 7, 2013, ViS announced a partnership with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) to map the pediatric populations of multiple countries to facilitate pediatric research. The release noted that such research was often frustrated by the complexity of finding patients for such research, even though about 60% of the disease burden for high priority conditions is borne by children.[^[5] ViS has also announced strategic collaborations with the accreditation agency, AAHRPP (the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs), and with one of the largest networks of clinical trial research sites, BRANY (Biomedical Research Alliance of New York).^[6] In August, 2013, the Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety (ACRES) announced a collaboration with ViS in the launch of a global clinical research network technology platform.^[6]

ViS Research was founded by Dr. Fabio Thiers, who used to be the Director of MIT's Strategic Global Trials research program.^[7]

Technology

ViS is the only feasibility platform that enables location selection, site/investigator selection and engagement in one sitting. In so doing it greatly facilitates clinical trial planning. It also provides the first and only fully integrated map of global clinical research activity and infrastructure. This is done through the use of proprietary algorithms that collect and harmonize disaggregated clinical research information, about ongoing research and local demographics, globally. In this way, ViS maps country, state, city and local disease-specific patient populations, ongoing research activity, research infrastructure and investigators, all within a specific disease and region.

ViS' analytics include the following:

Location Analytics: provides an interactive way to view location-specific information about patients, research activity, infrastructure, and research personnel for each disease covered
Location Profile: provides detailed analytics and scoring metrics, main research centers, and top research locations about each location
Advanced Center Analytics: enables instantaneous access to over 400,000 disease-specific sites all over the world
Investigator Analytics: enables trial planners to extensively evaluate and compare both general and disease-specific investigator information.
Network analytics: makes it possible to quickly determine the aggregate capabilities of research center networks and access their shared infrastructure
Partner Profile: provides analytics about site networks, SMOs, accreditation organizations, and many others
Feasibility management: enables the organization and management of research center evaluation and communication at scale

Innovation timeline

2003-2010

Research on inefficiencies in drug development and the process of site identification and selection by Fabio Thiers, MD, PhD. at MIT. Key findings were published in Nature.^[7]

2010-2012

2010 - The ViS Research Institute was founded. Initial work included developing advanced tools and procedures for harvesting and curating structured data about ongoing clinical research and center capabilities.
2011 - ViS began data collection and harmonization.
2012 - Analytics developed, including Location Analytics, Center Analytics, and Center Profile
Jun 2012 - Launch of the ViS Platform for collaborative analytics

2013–present

Jan - New Social Collaboration features such as Share, Messaging, and Network Updates
Mar - Location Scoring to rank countries, states, and cities on patient population, research activity, infrastructure, and investigators
Apr - New Investigator Profile to enable investigators to create and share a structured online profile
May - New Partner Profile page to provide analytics about SMOs, disease-specific networks, accreditation networks and others
Jun - New coverage for Melanoma, Headache, Atopic Dermatitis and filter by Pediatric population

Key Facts

2

References

^ http://visresearch.com/servlet/Controller?cmd=trialplanners
^ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inventiv-health-leverages-advanced-digital-technology-to-slash-the-time-required-to-conduct-feasibility-studies-241640041.html
^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on August 12, 2013. Retrieved January 25, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 13, 2013. Retrieved January 25, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ https://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130507-911627.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
^ ^a ^b http://www.visresearch.org/servlet/Controller?cmd=news
^ ^a ^b http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v7/n1/suppinfo/nrd2441.html