The paper identifies that while company rules, processes and systems seek to foster objectivity, common biases in decision making may hinder achievement of best possible performance. Psychological research proves again and again that people are bad at making complex decisions where there is risk involved. The paper demonstrates how better individual and team decision-making within drug discovery would enhance R&D performance. Feedback on problem solving performance could be one of the simplest measures to improve selection of compounds and effective screening sequences. The study also highlights that computational tools provide a more scientific approach that encourages objective consideration of all of the available information, helping scientists make decisions that are both balanced and rational, in the domains of library design, compound selection, screening, profiling and experimental design.

Drug discovery leaders receive much conflicting advice on possible ways to improve productivity and restore the rate of successful drug launches. Continuing technology investment, outsourcing of shared services and formation of smaller, disease-specific units, which bring researchers closer to clinicians are all current trends. However, senior management cannot afford to ignore the human dimension – are their teams making the best possible decisions given the information available to them, or that could be available given the right experiments?

Dr. Andrew Chadwick, Principal Consultant, Tessella, explains, “Past experience shows that many practical researchers remain baffled or confused by probabilistic models and so shy away from formal decision analysis. Yet reliance on gut instinct tends to lead to consistent patterns of mistakes. Discovery groups need to define and encourage ‘best practice’ to conduct projects in a way that captures wider company and industry experience. There is a need to make this as simple and accessible as possible via a more scientific approach.”

Good decision-making is central to drug discovery success and the new paper demonstrates that the interactive software platform, StarDrop from Optibrium, can help drug discovery scientists to guide their scientific judgment to make decisions with greater success. Dr. Matthew Segall, CEO of Optibrium, explains, “StarDrop can help drug discovery scientists to guide their decisions while designing and prioritising molecules with the aim of achieving an optimal balance of properties. The probabilistic scoring approach, employed by the StarDrop software platform to guide compound selection decisions in drug discovery, indicates the likelihood of success of a compound against a set of property criteria, given the available property data for that compound and taking into account the underlying uncertainty in the data.”

The intuitive software provides a decision-making framework, offering advantages over traditional predictive modelling platforms as it specifically helps users to identify chemistries with a high chance of success and focus expensive in-house resources. Used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies and research establishments globally, StarDrop guides compound selection and design decisions in all stages of drug discovery. The software provides a comprehensive range of features to support design and prioritization of high quality compounds including: probabilistic scoring; chemical space and glowing molecule visualisation; ADME QSAR models; P450 metabolism models and automatic model building.

To learn more about how StarDrop can aid good decision-making in drug discovery please call Optibrium on +44 (0) 1223 815 900, email info@optibrium.com or visit www.optibrium.com.

About Optibrium Ltd

Optibrium (www.optibrium.com) is dedicated to providing software to guide decisions involving complex, uncertain data in an intuitive way. Optibrium’s primary product, StarDrop, is focused on the drug discovery industry, helping scientists to guide decisions in the design and selection of high quality drug candidates. Optibrium was founded in 2009 as a spin-out of one of Galapagos service divisions: BioFocus. The founding group was responsible for the development of StarDrop from 2003 and, prior to this, research and development of related technologies since 1994. Based in Cambridge, UK, Optibrium has a global customer base ranging from top-ten pharmaceutical companies to small biotechs and academic groups.

For further press information please contact: Sarah Evans, The Scott Partnership, 1 Whiteside, Station Road, Holmes Chapel, Cheshire CW4 8AA, UK Tel: + 44 1477 539539 Fax: +44 1477 539 540 E-mail: optibrium@scottpr.com

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media contact

Christina Tealdi
PR/AR Executive | Tessella

D: +44 (0) 1235 546 638
M: +44 (0) 779 934 6453

E: christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Oxford, UK | 29 June 2010. Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments is pleased to announce the appointment of Stan Bradbury as a consultant assisting the Tessella Energy team.

Bradbury has decades of experience in the oil and gas sector: reaching the heights of CIO for Shell Global Solutions. He is now an independent consultant and able to provide advice and consultancy to Tessella as part of its drive to expand our energy business over the next two years.

Stan said: “I am very pleased to be helping Tessella with their ambitious growth plans: I believe their mix of technical IT skills, domain knowledge and the ability of Tessella consultants to find novel solutions to technical problems will bring real value to the energy sector”.

Alan Gaby, Director at Tessella said: “It is great to have Stan onboard. His wealth of experience in driving the IT of a major energy business will help us focus on what is important to these clients and how we can help them gain real value from technical IT”.

-Ends-

Notes to the Editor

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media Contact at Tessella
Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive | Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

Middlesbrough and Oxford, UK | June 29 2010. Industrial Technology Systems Ltd (ITS), the real-time IT, database and process control systems integrator with extensive experience in the nuclear sector and Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments, have been selected for a major framework agreement with Sellafield Ltd, for the provision of replacements of and upgrades to existing control and IT systems at their Cumbria site.

Sellafield Ltd introduced the framework agreement to reduce the project and procurement time it takes to award control system contracts. The aim of Sellafield Ltd is to standardise the pricing, documentation, execution and ongoing support approach for the diverse range of projects through this collaborative working agreement between Sellafield Ltd and its suppliers.

To successfully qualify for the framework agreement, ITS and Tessella completed a significant invitation to tender process. Part of the submission was a proposal for the upgrade of the first control system planned for replacement. This aspect had a major part in determining which companies would become part of the framework agreement, with the technical and commercial aspects of this being reviewed and taken into account in the overall decision making process. ITS and Tessella also had to supply comprehensive supportive literature, to demonstrate strengths in the following key areas:

• Evidence of a proven track record of delivering control systems in regulated environments

• Management and provision of suitably qualified experienced personnel

• Evidence of innovative solutions and working relationships with other customers

• Capability to undertake the first control system upgrade project

• Evidence of systematic and transparent cost charging processes

• QA processes

• Environmental, health and safety management record

• Socio economics

• Compliance with Sellafield Ltd code of ethics

Both ITS and Tessella specialise in the design and integration of real-time IT, database and control systems and a range of services including maintenance and 24-7 call out support, for highly demanding, regulated sectors including, pharmaceutical, medical device, nuclear and chemical. ITS also supplies robust non-contact vision inspection systems, fuel tracking solutions and legacy system support services to these industries.

ITS’ agreement with Tessella brings together the strengths of the two teams to form a large and varied skill base. The consortium, as well as having complementary skill sets, also has an overlap in control systems expertise which adds value as there is a common understanding already existing for the main functionality of projects to be completed under the framework agreement. With a track record of over 95 projects delivered in the nuclear sector, ITS offers a wealth of industry experience to complement the skill set.

The companies’ vendor independence allows the consortium to offer the most cost effective solutions that are best for each client, whether a commercial off the shelf product or a bespoke solution. More than 80% of ITS and Tessella order book is repeat business from satisfied clients who have experienced their ability to consistently deliver.

The ITS and Tessella consortium has partnered with Thales Information Systems to offer extensive innovative experience in obsolescence strategies to Sellafield. Thales has developed its own methodology for addressing systems obsolescence within large and complex regulated industries. Tessella and Thales have worked closely together on previous projects and continue to do so in various sectors. This existing working relationship is an important factor in the overall ITS, Tessella and Thales team.

Commenting on the framework Malcolm Knott, Managing Director of ITS, explains, “We see the opportunity to work on projects in this manner with Sellafield Ltd as a massive opportunity to develop and widen our relationship with people onsite. We have agreements like this with a number of other customers and each brings with it fresh challenges, but ultimately make us as a better company. We learn as a supplier and as a partner. Frameworks like this do work and we’ve been keen to strike up this type of relationship since we started, and that’s why we really wanted to be selected by Sellafield Ltd. The buzz it gave everyone when we announced to the staff that we’d been successful was amazing; colleagues have been making all sorts of suggestions to get more involved with Sellafield, knowing that there is a very good reason to go the extra mile.”

Peter Roberts, Business Development Manager at Tessella added, “Securing this Framework is another milestone in Tessella’s continued growth within the civil nuclear sector. Sellafield Ltd is an important client for the company and one with which we aim to develop a long-term relationship in several areas related to software and information technology. It is also a significant project for Tessella as we develop our successful collaboration with ITS in the field of control systems”.

ITS and Tessella believe that the consortium will provide the strength in depth required for any control and IT system project to be completed successfully under the framework agreement. Both companies have endeavoured to build teams that have all the capability and experience Sellafield Ltd needs and their combined strength is formidable. Through its experience across many sectors the consortium can provide the innovation required to address the obsolescence challenges, and each partner brings a unique, complementary and significant value to the team.

And this framework is proving to be the beginning of a fruitful relationship, with all the companies involved already identifying other customers where this consortia approach will add value.

-Ends-

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media Contact at Tessella

Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive | Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

About Industrial Technology Systems Ltd

Established in 1991, Industrial Technology Systems Ltd (ITS) is an independent systems integrator, specialising in the design and implementation of automation, control, IT and management information systems. ITS has a proven track record in supplying innovative, engineering solutions that provide real business value to customers in highly regulated industries including AstraZeneca, Becton Dickinson, INS Innovation, Magnox, Piramal Healthcare and Sellafield Ltd.

ITS has been working in the nuclear industry for over 13 years and has successfully completed over 95 projects in the sector, from feasibility studies and legacy system replacements through to the design and delivery of large SCADA and PLC systems, fuel tracking systems and maintenance contracts.

ITS has strong partnership agreements with many major control systems manufacturers including Rockwell, Wonderware, Siemens, Honeywell and GE Fanuc. This flexibility allows ITS to offer the most innovative and appropriate solutions to meet each customer’s requirement.

Further information available at www.its-ltd.co.uk

Media contact at ITS

Trina Ives | Marketing Executive | Phone 44 (0) 1642 222232 | t-ives@its-ltd.co.uk

Päivi Happonen, Development Director of The Finnish Archives, said; “The Finnish Archives’ task is to ensure that records belonging to the national cultural heritage are preserved. One of the many key reasons that we chose Tessella and Tieto was their proven track record of delivery.”

Sissi Kolbe, Tieto’s Director of Business Development in Information Management is delighted to continue working with Tessella; “Tieto always picks best of breed solutions and Tessella’s SDB is the perfect choice. This project follows on from our successful delivery of SDB to the National Archives of Estonia and we hope to further expand our operations with Tessella”.

Jon Tilbury, Tessella’s Director responsible for archiving technology, said; “We are very pleased to be working with The Finnish Archives and look forward to their input in the SDB User Group. They will become the ninth organisation to deploy SDB which is proving to be the long term preservation solution of choice in this demanding sector.”

Tilbury added: “We are again delighted to be using Tieto’s expertise in electronic content management and their understanding of how Nordic countries operate. We now have two successful collaborations underway in Estonia and Finland and hope to add many more”.

-Ends-

Notes to the Editor

About Tieto

Tieto is an IT service company providing IT, R&D and consulting services. With approximately 17 000 experts, we are among the leading IT service companies in Northern Europe and the global leader in selected segments. We specialize in areas where we have the deepest understanding of our customers’ businesses and needs. Our superior customer centricity and expertise in digital services set us apart from our competitors.

Further information available at www.tieto.com

About Tessella

Tessella is a world leader in the provision of Digital Archiving technologies, working with major governments worldwide. For more information about digital archiving solutions, visit www.digital-preservation.com

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Further information available at www.tessella.com

Media Contact

Tessella | Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive

Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453 |Christina.tealdi@tessella.com

JANET(UK), the organisation that runs the UK’s education and research network, and Tessella, a leading technology consultancy, have developed a powerful new centralised monitoring system for the UK wide network that provides JANET(UK) and its regional network operators with higher levels of visibility into network performance and availability.

Jeremy Sharp, Head of Strategic Technologies at JANET explains “Netsight, is a significant upgrade to previous offerings. By gathering data from around the JANET network and compiling it into a central resilient database Netsight enables us to analyse a much greater depth and breadth of information, making it far easier to monitor trends and identify network performance issues”

The centralised approach has other benefits. Jeremy adds “Previously the system was spread across 15 different UNIX machines at different locations around the network. This was not only costly to maintain but lacked resilience – if one machine went down there would be a big gap in the data collected for that part of the network”

Tessella were chosen to design and implement the new system through the government’s CATALIST tendering process. Jeremy explains “We looked at off-the-shelf products, but these were aimed at traditional IT environments and lacked the flexibility to provide data to JANET’s network operators. Working with Tessella enabled us to build a be-spoke solution that fitted our specific needs”

Jeremy adds “Another key requirement for the new system was extensibility, in that the system can also be used to monitor other JANET(UK) managed services, such as the UK Access Management Federation and to collect power usage data of the JANET network enabling carbon footprint calculations to be made. Tessella’s on-going project management and software development expertise have been instrumental to the overall success of the project”

Learn more about Netsight at www.ja.net/services/network-status/netsight.html

-ends-

Notes for Editors

About JANET(UK) :
JANET(UK) manages the operation and development of JANET on behalf of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for the UK Further and Higher Education Funding Councils. JISC also works in partnership with the Research Councils. JANET(UK) is government funded, with the primary aim of providing and developing a network infrastructure that meets the needs of the education and research communities.

About JANET
JANET is the network dedicated to the needs of education and research in the UK. It connects the UK’s education and research organisations to each other, as well as to the rest of the world through links to the global Internet. In addition, JANET includes a separate network that is available to the community for experimental activities in network development.

Trademarks
JANET and JANET(UK) are registered trademarks of the Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland and Wales. The JNT Association is the registered user of these trademarks.

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media Contact
Tessella
Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Tessella’s Mark Evans, Digital Archiving Practice Manager, will giving a talk on Digital Archiving Initiatives: An international perspective,

To find out more about this event or to register online, visist www.archivists.ca

This is the conclusion of a report, Digital Divide: Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation, released this month by the European Commission co-funded digital preservation project, Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services), this month. The report presents the findings of a survey into the work of 200 organisations worldwide to maintain long-term access to digital information.

Unlike information held in physical formats such as paper, information held in digital formats is prone to short lifetimes. Storage media can deteriorate rapidly and hardware or software required to read them can quickly become obsolete. Typically, digital information has a lifespan of years to decades rather than centuries.

The report highlights the rapid rate at which the volume of digital information is increasing and the importance organisations attach to preserving it for the long-term. Key findings:

• The volume of digital content that organisations expect to archive will rise 25-fold over the next decade from an average of 20 terabytes (TB) now to 500 TB in 2019.

• Eighty per cent of organisations already need to preserve documents and images now; 70 per cent will also need to hold onto databases, websites, audio and video files in ten years’ time.

• Ninety-three per cent of organisations are aware of the challenges of digital preservation. Seventy-six per cent include digital preservation in their operational planning, 71 per cent in their business-continuity planning and 62 per cent in their financial planning.

• Just 48 per cent of organisations have a digital preservation policy and 47 per cent a budget in place. This drops to one in four public sector institutions. Eighty-seven per cent of organisations plan to tackle digital preservation and 77 per cent plan to invest in a solution within two years.

• There is demand for technology to automate the processes of planning preservation, profiling collections and preserving content by converting it into more accessible formats.

• Organisations with a digital preservation policy are more likely to include digital preservation in their planning, three times more likely to have a budget for it, four times more likely to be investing in a solution now and three times more likely to have a long-term solution already in place. Those without a policy are four times more likely to have no experience of or be unaware of the problem, three times more likely to have no plans and twice as likely to put off purchasing a solution for over two years.

Dr Adam Farquhar, Programme Director and Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library, which coordinates Planets said: “Work to preserve digital content for the long-term is led by organisations such as national libraries and archives which have large volumes of content and a legal and moral imperative. Over the next ten years, other types of organisation will be faced with the same challenges when the volume of digital content they hold rises to comparable levels and they are subject to legal, regulatory and commercial pressures.”

Preserving digital content requires ongoing action to convert information into new and accessible formats, or to simulate the environment in which it was created. It also requires the authors to document information so that a file can be interpreted in future.

Dr Robert Sharpe, Head of Digital Archiving Solutions at Tessella, which carried out the survey for Planets, said: “The move from information stored in paper to information stored in digital formats has presented organisations with new archival challenges and organisations must act now. It is clear, however, that organisations with a preservation policy are much further down the road to a solution than others.”

-ends-

For further information or to speak to Dr Adam Farquhar or Dr Robert Sharpe, contact:

Media Contacts

Christina Tealdi
AR/PR Executive
Tessella
+44 (0) 1235 546 638

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Jane Humphreys
Planets Dissemination and Take-up Sub Project Lead
The British Library
+44 (0) 1937 546748

jane.humphreys@bl.uk

To download the report, visit: www.planets-project.eu

Notes to Editors

About Planets
Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) is a four-year €15 million project co-funded by the European Commission under its Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the Sixth Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (IST-033789).

Since 2006, the project has been working to develop a framework and a suite of technology to enable institutions in Europe to manage and access their digital collections for the long-term. Planets is coordinated by the British Library and delivered by 16 Consortium partners, comprising national archives, national libraries, research institutions and commercial companies in Europe.

For more information, visit: www.planets-project.eu

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas.

Tessella has proven expertise in the area of reliable and authentic long-term preservation of electronic records, for both government and scientific organizations. In recent years a number of mainly academic and government organizations have been at the cutting edge of facing up to the digital preservation challenge and Tessella plays a key role in a number of the most practical of these initiatives.

With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Dr Robert Sharpe is the co-author of Mind the Gap: Assessing Digital Preservation Needs in the UK, which was published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in 2006. The report was the culmination of a UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment (UKNA) study to investigate the current state of digital preservation in the UK and to assess and develop a clear way forward.

For more information please visit: www.digital-preservation.com

Oxford, UK | 28 April 2010. Today, Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments, launches version of 4 of Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB4) at the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving in Geneva, Switzerland.

The technology helps memory institutions (including libraries and archives), who are already skilled at preserving paper material; face the problems posed by preserving material stored in digital formats. Version 4 provides the architecture and functions to deliver a multi-tenant digital archiving solution that can support small local archives through to large national systems. Key to this is a flexible workflow engine which allows customers an easy way to configure their own ingest, data management, access and preservation and processes.

Ann Keen, archiving account director, at Tessella said: “We believe that multi-tenant facilities are going to be increasingly important in future digital archiving solutions. The recent selection by the Austrian Federal Chancellery of Siemens IT Solutions and Services and Tessella SDB to develop the Austrian State e-government Archives validates this point of view”.

Jon Tilbury, director at Tessella added: “We believe that working in partnership is hugely important to the success of SDB. SDB continues to be the archive of choice for advanced long-term archiving and the SDB User Group has really helped set product direction”.

The SDB User Group now compromises 9 flagship organisations: UK National Archives, Swiss Federal Archives, Malaysian National Archives, Dutch National Archives, Rotterdam Regional Archives, the British Library, Wellcome Trust Libraries, Estonian Archives and The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

SDB was developed out of work done in partnership with The National Archives of the UK to help confront the problem of digital preservation. The software, which has already been in use at The National Archives for over six years as the basis of their award-winning Digital Archive system, has been significantly enhanced as part of The National Archives’ Seamless Flow programme.

- Ends -

Notes to the editor

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

For further information visit our dedicated microsite on http://www.digital-preservation.com/

Media Contact
Tessella
Christina Tealdi
PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Oxford, UK | 27 April 2010. Today, Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments previewed clinical trial design software that addresses the challenge of designing Phase 1 trials for combination therapies. Tom Parke, head of clinical technologies at Tessella, is presenting Smarter Clinical Trials at the Optimising Clinical Development in Oncology 2010 conference on the 27th April 2010 at Le Meridien Piccadilly, London, UK.

The development of combination therapies is becoming increasingly common in oncology, but currently development teams are limited to traditional Phase I clinical trial designs that only allow them to evaluate changing the dose of one of the agents, keeping the dose of the other agent fixed. This is incredibly limiting, significantly reducing the combination options that are explored, quite possibly missing combinations that offer greater therapeutic value for no increase in the level of toxicity. For a combination of two drugs there will be a series of combined doses which generate the same level of toxicity. What the “Combination Finder” trial design allows the drug developer to do is find the full range of combinations that could be taken forward to further trials.

“A clinical trial seeking to determine the Maximum Tolerated Dose must use as few patients as possible, avoiding either wasting subjects on too-low combinations or too-high toxicity combinations – these would not only be poor for the patients in the trial, but also not as informative from the drug development program as placing subjects on combinations just below the limit of tolerability.” said Parke. “Designing these kinds of trials is particularly challenging, and basing our tool on some published work at MD Anderson, University of Texas and the University of North Carolina we believe our prototype will allow the industry to assess how close we are to having a practical solution.”

Tessella plan to work with existing users of Tessella & Berry Consultants FACTS™ clinical trial design software, as well other leading pharmaceutical companies to refine the functionality of the prototype. If successful the capability could be integrated into the next release of FACTS scheduled for September.

-Ends-

Notes to the editor

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Further information available at www.tessella.com

Media Contact

Tessella
Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Oxford, UK | 14 April 2010. Today, Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments previewed clinical trial design software that addresses the challenge of designing Phase 1 trials for combination therapies. Tom Parke, head of clinical technologies at Tessella, presented the prototype version at CHI’s combination therapies conference in Philadelphia, PA.

The development of combination therapies is becoming increasingly common in oncology, but currently development teams are limited to traditional Phase I clinical trial designs that only allow them to evaluate changing the dose of one of the agents, keeping the dose of the other agent fixed. This is incredibly limiting, significantly reducing the combination options that are explored, quite possibly missing combinations that offer greater therapeutic value for no increase in the level of toxicity. For a combination of two drugs there will be a series of combined doses which generate the same level of toxicity.  What the “Combination Finder” trial design allows the drug developer to do is find the full range of combinations that could be taken forward to further trials.

“A clinical trial seeking to determine the Maximum Tolerated Dose must use as few patients as possible, avoiding either wasting subjects on too-low combinations or too-high toxicity combinations – these would not only be poor for the patients in the trial, but also not as informative from the drug development program as placing subjects on combinations just below the limit of tolerability.” said Parke. “Designing these kinds of trials is particularly challenging, and basing our tool on some published work at MD Anderson, University of Texas and the University of North Carolina we believe our prototype will allow the industry to assess how close we are to having a practical solution.”

Tessella plan to work with existing users of Tessella & Berry Consultants FACTS™ clinical trial design software, as well other leading pharmaceutical companies to refine the functionality of the prototype. If successful the capability could be integrated into the next release of FACTS scheduled for September.

-Ends-

About Tessella

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Media Contact

Tessella
Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com