We recently closed our company’s biggest-ever acquisition: Medidata. Our companies are coming together to advance our shared goal of transforming the life sciences industry, specifically to boost innovation in personalized health and higher industrial performance.
Medidata, which will become Dassault Systèmes’ third largest brand, stood out for its entrepreneurial spirit and passion for transforming clinical development across the globe.
To discover more about what this acquisition means, 3DPerspectives interviewed Claire Biot, PhD, Vice President for the Life Sciences industry at Dassault Systèmes.
3DPerspectives: Could you explain what Medidata provides to the marketplace and why it is important?
Claire Biot: Medidata is a global life-sciences technology company, providing cloud-based solutions, dedicated to improving the way clinical research is designed, conducted, analyzed and commercialized. Their goal is to drive efficiency into and improve quality throughout clinical development programs by accelerating processes, enhancing decision-making, minimizing operational risk, reducing costs and transforming trial strategies.
Medidata aims to enable its customers to bring new and enhanced therapeutics to the public quickly and safely. They provide the means for these companies to automate, streamline, support, and enhance clinical development activities.
They serve pharmaceutical biotech companies, medical devices and diagnostics companies, institutions (academic research centers, government, non-profit organizations), clinical research organizations, and other entities engaged in conducting and/or sponsoring clinical trials and commercializing treatments. These customers range in size from the smallest of start-ups to the largest of global pharmaceutical companies.
3DP: How will this acquisition benefit both companies?
CB: Dassault Systèmes’ purpose is to provide business and people with 3DEXPERIENCE universes to imagine sustainable innovations capable of harmonizing product, nature and life. It is this last part – life – that the Medidata portfolio will complement.
We provide a virtual experience platform that allows customers to create innovative new products and services, and ultimately address the major challenges facing the world today: cities for people; energy and resources for the long term; how to supply and produce; and inspirational education and research… and personalized healthcare. Adding Medidata will help us accelerate that final challenge.
With both companies ‘cloud first’ vision and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform operating as both as a system of operation and as a business model we have another key strategic alignment delivering value to all Life Sciences stakeholders.
3DP: How will this acquisition benefit customers?
Current 3DS customers in pharma and biotech segments can benefit from Medidata’s market-leading offering for clinical trial management and analytics. They can also now create a next-generation pipeline where data from clinical trials and real world evidence feeds back into research and discovery for precision medicine and personalized therapeutics development. These benefits also extend to our medical technology customers that develop class II and class III medical devices that require clinical trials and a feedback loop from clinical and real world data into design and development.
The bottom line: joint 3DS and Medidata customers will be able to collaborate on an integrated data-driven and model-based approach to their research, development, production, and ultimately commercial, chain. These companies can imagine new patient experiences, which enhance the quality of life and can only result from an integrated platform for sustainable innovation.
3DP: How will this acquisition impact the life sciences industry?
CB: At Dassault Systèmes we believe that virtual worlds extend and improve the real world. Our goal is to provide solutions to transform how products are designed, simulated, produced, marketed and supported. This certainly includes the life sciences industry, especially with the advent of personalized medicine. It’s changing the approach to healthcare and where and how products are used. Now we need to change how products are made and brought to market.
We’ve spent the last few years expanding Dassault Systèmes’ offerings into life sciences. This is because we believe that the life sciences sector is ready for a next generation business and scientific platform to give companies a comprehensive means to manage the entire drug innovation process, from molecule design and manufacturing to clinical trials. We believe that leveraging the virtual world can accelerate the next generation of therapeutics.
Medidata has the broadest and deepest cloud-based product suite in the life sciences market. And it’s easy to use, flexible and scalable It’s among the market leaders in both data capture and clinical trial management,, and is well positioned for the next generation of clinical trials. When those capabilities are added to our 3DEXPERIENCE platform, for the first time life sciences companies can team with a fully integrated player to bring them through the entire the pharma and medical device lifecycle: spanning from discovery to development to commercialization to production. Our hope is this means we can transform how we get the right drug to the right patient.
Bottom line: the benefit to the life sciences industry is the platform effect spanning drug research and discovery, development, clinical testing, manufacturing and commercialization. But the ultimate benefit will be “smarter treatments for healthier people”, as Medidata says.
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Thanks to Claire for helping us discover more about this major news! For more information:
Alyssa is a Communications Director on the Dassault Systèmes Corporate Publishing team. She’s been part of DS for over 20 years, in roles ranging from public relations to marketing programs. Twitter: @DS_Alyssa