Ecron Acunova—One stop shop

DA Prasanna, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, ECRON AcuNova

Manipal Acunova a Contract Research Organisation (CRO) is a collaborative venture between the Manipal Education and Medical Group International India and AcuNova Life Sciences. It was incorporated in 2004 and started operations from 2005. Since then the company has been growing at rate of approximately 300 percent year-on-year. Manipal AcuNova has research facilities in Bangalore, Mangalore and Manipal as well as a wholly owned subsidiaries in the US and UK.

Tie ups

The company has had a few alliances which very well sync with the business model. Its subsidiary Acunova Life entered into a strategic collaboration with Kiecana Clinical Research (KCR), headquartered in Warsaw, Poland for leveraging operations in South Asia, Europe and Latin America. This will benefit the CRO as DA Prasanna, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, ECRON AcuNova feels, that international clients are more at ease with CROs that have multi region presence and offer end to end service. "We are able to address this need, with KCR—highly reputed CRO in Central and East Europe. KCR's regional expertise combined with their strength in FDA submission is a new form of alliance for our industry," he adds.

Besides this the company also collaborated with Avesthagen for drug discovery, pre-clinical, clinical research including regulatory matters.

Later in the year 2007, they acquired 'ECRON'- an experienced CRO with presence in both west and east Europe. ECRON has been in this space for over two decades, with its long standing credibility and reputation in the industry, as well as goodwill earned with regulators for quality service. "Our endeavour through this acquisition was to gain experience in Europe in clinical development which has now become a success story and a key milestone," says Prasanna.

Business model

Berlin centre of Ecron Acunova

The company's business model entails provisioning of end to end services in clinical trials, leveraging the India advantage. End to end services involve conceptualisation of clinical development plan for a drug, protocol writing, regulatory submission, project management, IP management, data management, laboratory services, statistical planning and analysis as well as clinical study reporting. "The reason for the company being a one stop shop," Prasanna feels is, "by having all services under a single roof, we provide complete clarity to the drug company on study management. Apart from the above, we also provide stand alone services for project management, data management, laboratory etc. they have adopted a similar model in eastern and west Europe. Their services include clinical operations, (Phase I-Phase IV) which is monitoring and project management, bioavailability/bioequivalence studies, central laboratory for clinical trials and biomarker validation, clinical data management and biostatistics and site management services (SMO)."

Growth drivers

The company's core competency vests in leveraging regional competitive advantage in clinical research. "We combine the quality and standards of the mature Western European market combined with the fast recruitment and cost advantage of Eastern Europe and India," says Prasanna. Their unique strength lies in the composition of its team and their involvement/role in various advisory boards. They have 20 MDs, 19 PhDs and 19 Physicians with MBBS and BDS. The combination of highly qualified personnel with access to Medical Universities in India, Europe and US benchmarks them as the 'Science CRO' in this space.

The company has the required infrastructure (in terms of PI database) to execute any phase of clinical trials in key therapeutic areas namely: endocrinology, cardiovascular, CNS, dermatology, respiratory, ophthalmology, oncology and antiviral. They also have the experience of managing diagnostic device studies. The company's BA/BE business vertical has the exposure and expertise to conduct studies of varied nature ie. studies on healthy volunteers with varied therapeutic areas and studies on patients etc. Their BA/BE facility and studies have been inspected and audited by USFDA and WHO regulatory authorities. In addition the audits have been successful and have been approved for marketing in US and Europe by the inspecting authorities. The team is experienced in combining their competency in PK/PD, lab, imaging and project management to conduct challenging early development trials for innovative companies.

Future plans

The growth driver has been its CRO operations and clinical trials in particular which contribute to 75 percent of the total revenue. The company has crossed approximately Rs 50 crore in size last year and has plans to cross Rs 100 crore in the near future, informs Prasanna.

"We plan to leverage the advantages of China and Latin America in clinical development as part of our services. Further to this as the chronic disease management is a big health burden, we see growth in demand for these areas," says Prasanna.