Merger enables easier Access to Patient Populations

Drug development CRO/CDMO group Nuvisan Pharma Services (Neu-Elm, Germany) recently acquired Inamed GMBH, a CRO specialised in clinical trials with patients living with respiratory and rare diseases.

The acquisition gives Nuvisan access to patient populations that are very difficult to recruit, such as patients with cystic fibrosis. Inamed is also one of very few CROs in the world offering orally inhaled products flow-profile studies with a combination of all the associated skills under one roof (technical preparation of devices, flow-profile measurements, in-house clinical performance and management of some external pediatric sites).

Having already built a close partnership through collaboration on a number of services for their customers, the merger was the logical next step in this long lasting, successful cooperation.

The Inamed site has 28 specialist staff and is located on the periphery of Munich. It has an in-house clinical pharmacology unit of 24 beds, plus six intensive monitoring beds. The short distance to the Nuvisan headquarters ensures steady personnel exchange and just-in-time logistics between the sites.

“With Inamed’s capabilities, we are adding specialist expertise in the fields of both respiratory and combined multi-center studies. We will extend our services in patient clinical trials and increase our overnight facilities to 160 beds across the two sites,” said Dr Ralf Wulkow, executive vice president, clinical services, at Nuvisan. “The Inamed acquisition is the next step in our continuous growth strategy, which will help us become an ‘all pharma services’ company in the field of early stage drug development for the pharmaceutical industry.”

“With integration into the Nuvisan Group, we will open up the complete scope of services of a large and efficient full-service CRO for all our customers," said Dr med. Wolfgang Timmer, clinical pharmacologist and CMO at Inamed. “This also gives us a high degree of stability and the opportunity to use resources across different locations for the benefit of our customers. We anticipate that many operational synergies will emerge.”