Singapore: India's second largest IT firm Infosys has unveiled a cloud-based solution to speed up clinical trials and lower drug development costs at the three-day 'Sapphire Now' conference being held at Orlando, USA.

"The solution helps life sciences companies to accelerate clinical trials by driving greater collaboration between pharmaceutical firms and contract research organizations," the company said in its statement.

In the new version of clinical trial supply management, the cloud solution will improve productivity of drug development process and ensure timely supply of drugs to patients at lower cost.

"Enterprises using our solution will be able to price their drugs competitively as the software application enables real-time collaboration and helps transform their research and development (R&D) cost model," said Mr Manish Tandon, Infosys' global head for life sciences and services.

The solution offers tools to manage the entire supply chain of clinical trials, covering demand and supply, planning and distribution across R&D sites. A beta version of the solution is in use for clinical trials at some of the global pharma firms in Europe and USA.

The software product will enable pharma companies to respond faster to changes in demand, based on enrollment and patient turnaround during trials as it can be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, incorporating business processes," Mr Tandon informed.

Being cloud-based, the solution will be offered on pay-per-use basis, which will help pharma and biotech firms and contract research units to avoid investing in and managing expensive IT infrastructure for clinical trials. "With mobility-enabled transactions and remote access capabilities, the solution facilitates real-time data entry for faster decision making," Mr Tandon added.

"Clinical trials are growing in scale and complexity, driving a need for business processes and systems that integrate the end-to-end activities, decisions and information across business functions," the statement said quoting from a recent Gartner report.