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The measure uses the amount of NIH grant dollars awarded to Veloscustomers among the 100 largest such grant recipients who conduct clinicalresearch. This group historically receives about 80 percent of totalextramural NIH clinical research funding. The company's customers in thisgroup receive 47 percent of NIH funding. Together with new Velos customers incontract stage, this figure will increase to just over 50 percent by year end.The figure only includes paying customers and excludes other research siteswhich may also use Velos eResearch as participants in clinical trials led byVelos customers. "Fifty percent is a pretty good level of market penetrationto achieve five years from product launch, which reflects quite a bit ofpreparation work," observed John McIlwain, President and CEO of Velos, Inc.
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While Velos eResearch was launched in 2003, the company spent years andmillions of dollars between 1996 and 2003 designing and redesigning multipleiterations of the product before it launched. "It's taken years of work,singular focus, robust product design, and fabulous customers with great inputto get to this stage," said Priti Sahai, MD, Velos Vice President of ProductDevelopment.
Now in Version 8, the robust Velos system allows large academic medicalcenters and research institutions -- that have unique and expansiverequirements -- to apply Velos eResearch in a wide variety of creative andproductive ways, in addition to standard clinical trial fulfillment. Someexamples include:
-- Patient-self reporting: Customers capture research or outcomes datadirectly from patients on touch screen, Internet-platform kiosks in theclinic, prior to the patient visit. The data are used by physicians forcare-giving purposes during the same patient visit and are posted to the Velosresearch database. Some institutions use such patient self-reportingcapabilities on-line, enabling patients to report research and outcomes databefore and after treatment in accordance with study protocols.
-- Comprehensive research database: Some customers use Velos to captureall patient data, not just clinical trial data. These data are then used foroutcomes, research, and publication purposes.
-- Clinical trial networks and consortiums: One Velos customer runs astatewide research consortium with hundreds of users across dozens of sites,fulfilling 50 or so clinical trials. Another group of very large cancercenters uses a federated Velos database grid to conduct dozens of clinicaltrials that are supported by both government and pharmaceutical sponsors atsites across the U.S.
-- South Korea, with a population about the size of California, uses Velosfor cancer research for the entire country.
Velos customers also use Velos eResearch for research budgeting andbilling, on-line protocol review meetings, federal reporting, tissue andspecimen management, registry reporting, and more.
The company's product design strategy from the start has been "go deep andbroad." Medicine and medical research are specialty disciplines, which meansproducts need to be able to "go deep" in supporting particular specialty areasof research. To "go deep" effectively, a system must also support researchercollaborators across many institutions in the same specialty area. At thesame time, within any one institution, research is usually conducted in manydisease or sub
