IQVIA teams with Alibaba for clinical data storage in China
IQVIA has partnered with Alibaba Cloud – a tech subsidiary of Chinese tech firm Alibaba – to provide commercial and clinical data storage to drug makers working in the country.
The agreement – financial terms of which were not provided – will see the Alibaba unit provide data hosting in mainland China using its own system and the customer relationship management platform, Salesforce.
The deal will help biopharmaceutical firms, which are running clinical trials or selling products in China to meet regulators’ data requirements, according to Sanjay Chikarmane, IQVIA’s chief product officer.
“This collaboration of leading global technology providers signals a new course to compliance for life sciences customers in China.”
“We are looking forward to expanding jointly with Alibaba to quickly and efficiently host our products locally in China utilizing Alibaba Cloud–a trusted, highly performant and secure technology platform” he added.
The deal will facilitate the expansion of IQVIA’s “connected intelligence” offering, which provides data, advanced analytics, innovative technologies, and domain expertise to drug industry customers.
IQVIA specified that the partnership will help customers “uncover fresh insights and achieve transformative change to succeed in rapidly evolving global markets.”
China is currently revising its cybersecurity and data privacy regulations. And, according to analysis by PwC, there may be changes impacting the storage of clinical trial data.
“China’s laws cover a broad category of “important data” related to national security, economic development, and societal interest.
“While details are still emerging regarding its scope, information falling within this category is likely to include personal genetic information, clinical trial data, adverse event data and data related to experimental drugs in China.”
In addition, IQVIA’s efforts to bolster its presence in the Chinese trial sector and wider pharmaceuticals market are in keeping with comments it made about the market in a recent report.
The firm wrote “China as the world’s second largest country by pharmaceutical spending, will increase volume by 8% in aggregate over five years, while spending will increase 19%, a more modest rate than in the prior years and still embedding a focus on expanding access to novel drugs via the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL).”
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