Roxaane Research—Aiming high

Roxaane Research, a Contract Research Organisation (CRO) based in Chennai was incorporated in mid 2007 by Dr Vasudevan Mahalingam. Since its inception there has been no looking back for Roxaane. The emphasis on strict implementation of processes at Roxaane has ensured quality in every aspect of their projects with tight budgetary and timeline control resulting in customer satisfaction.

It provides an entire range of clinical research services including clinical operations, clinical data management etc. Apart from operational offices in Calcutta and Hyderabad, Roxaane also has a business development hub in New Jersey, US. The company specialises in the oncology, diabetology, cardiology and endocrinology therapeutic segments. They provide services to both IT and pharma companies for doing clinical research. Currently they are doing several projects across departments for example; they have one project each in their medical writing, pharmacovigilance and biostatistics departments.

Giving more details on the latest achievement, K G Ravichandra, Vice-President, Roxaane Research says, "One of our major milestones achieved is the signing of an MOU with a top IT company. This means that we will be the preferred partner for providing clinical research services to them. Apart from that all our departments are fully operational with robust SOPs and policies."

Journey

In a very short timespan of a year, Roxaane has been updating itself technologically so as to meet global needs and standards of their customer base. Their clinical data management (CDM) has implemented Oracle Clinical Suite with remote data capture. Roxaane's CDM comes with lot of value additions like medical coding by medical personnel (MedRA and WHODD), meticulous manual review of data etc. It also has PHEEDIT from the SAS Institute, INFORM for electronic data capture is soon slotted to be in house.

Explaining their clinical operations Ravichandra says that they have a comprehensive database of investigators across therapeutic areas like oncology, diabetology, and cardiology etc. They cover sites across India ie. Calcutta and Hyderabad and also have global SOPs and other guidelines that ensure quality across various offices. In biostatistics they have implemented SAS 9.1.3 and have a team of SAS programmers who manage it.

Success often comes after a fair deal of struggle, but a true winner is one who comes off victorious. For any start up company one of the many challenges is to deal with the shortage of industry trained human resources and it was no exception for Roxaane either. However according to Ravichandra, "Luckily for us this process was less burdensome as ours was and is a close knit network. All employees were recruited based on personal references and shared a common vision." Further he says that apart from the shortage of trained resources, the other challenge was to get business and sustain operations in a competitive market where the price war is only going to heat up further in the coming future. However the company's belief has always been to give clients the best value additions at nominal prices.

Looking ahead

Roxaane's team comprises of highly trained physicians and doctorates with a collective experience of several years, across therapeutic areas. Roxaane has a strong client base in India with talks going on with US and Europe based companies that are expected to materialise soon. Further shedding light on expansion plans, Ravichandra avers that at present they are looking at organic growth, however, expansions by way of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) in to new geographies may be considered in the future. Funds will not be a constraint for their expansion plans and their investment figures will depend on the expansion plans that they have. On a positive note Ravichandra concludes, "We want Roxaane to be the best CRO in India in terms of value addition and quality. We also expect to grow to be one of the largest in India as we have received a lot of positive communications from prospective clients and we hope to start working with them very soon."