SHANAHAN NAMED VP OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
—One of the newest international companies to expand into Cambridge is Ariana (R) Pharma–a 2003 spin-out of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Its subsidiary, Ariana Data Intelligence, Inc., located in the Cambridge Innovation Center at 1 Broadway, will provide novel non-statistical clinical data analysis technology to pharma and the FDA, Ariana announced today.
The technology, “Knowledge Extraction and Management Technology (KEM)” is aimed at reducing cost, bias, and risk in clinical trials.
“The US pharma and biotech markets tend to be early technology adopters and are searching for better data analytics tools to advance personalized medicine using all the new biomarker, genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data now being generated,” said Dr. Mohammad Afshar, Ariana’s President and CEO.
KEM “is the only FDA-tested technology that can simultaneously analyze all these variables and pull out patient responder sub-groups, optimize biomarker signatures and remove bias from clinical trials,” Afshar said.
A “unique” association rules-based (non-statistical) analytical technology, KEM finds patient responder sub-populations and biomarker signatures that statistical methods are unable to detect, according to Afshar. KEM thus optimizes clinical trial inclusion/exclusion criteria, thereby lowering the number of patients needed to reach clinical endpoints and saving sponsors both time and cash, and reducing clinical drug development risk.
In conjunction with the opening, Ariana has appointed James M. Shanahan as Vice President of Business Development. Shanahan was previously a co-founder and is currently a board member of SynDevRx, Inc., an oncology-focused biotech company. He was also a co-founder and VP Corporate Development of JAM Technologies, Inc.
Ariana offers something “special and desperately needed “by the pharmaceutical industry, Shanahan said. “Companies spend tens of millions generating data. Now, it’s all about making sense of that data. KEM identifies useful, complex biological relationships that statistics routinely miss.”
More information is available at http://www.arianapharma.com/ .
–Anita M. Harris
