Roche selects ICON as technology partner

ICON plc, (NASDAQ: ICLR; ISIN:IE0005711209), a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, today announced that it has been selected by Roche as its technology partner for storing and managing medical images collected during the company's clinical research programs.

“We are delighted to have been selected as a technology partner by the Roche informatics team and to be involved with such a collaborative and forward-thinking group”

Roche is using ICON's MIRA™ (Medical Image Review and Analysis) software as the company's central repository for medical images. MIRA is the core application used by ICON Medical Imaging in its daily operations and provides functionality for imaging and clinical data management, image analysis, project management and document management. MIRA™ is being implemented by Roche in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which provides Roche with 24/7 access to imaging data from anywhere in the world and also eliminates the technology costs associated with purchasing and maintaining an image management system in-house. ICON is the first medical imaging provider to offer clients a SaaS solution for their image management needs.

Commenting on the partnership, Dr. Gudrun Zahlman, Leader Imaging Infrastructure at Roche, commented, "We committed to ICON and MIRA after a one year pilot program. The comprehensive functionality of MIRA, the US and EU redundancy of the data, and the responsive nature of the ICON staff, proved the best fit for Roche's needs. Additionally, we have achieved the seamless integration of images hosted in MIRA with Roche's clinical data repository and data mining tools for trial decision making, and have integrated 3^rd party image analysis software within MIRA for quantitative biomarker research."

"We are delighted to have been selected as a technology partner by the Roche informatics team and to be involved with such a collaborative and forward-thinking group," commented Andrew Kraus, Executive Vice President and CTO at ICON Medical Imaging. "MIRA's superior imaging capabilities, and fault tolerance mechanisms, made it an ideal solution to offer clients in a SaaS framework. MIRA's extensible architecture also enables plug-in modules for advanced analysis. Today's announcement is another good example of the innovation that ICON is bringing to the drug development process and we look forward to building on our close technology partnership with Roche."