Archana Shukla

Mumbai: Homegrown clinical research organisation (CRO) SIRO Clinpharma is set to foray into Europe with the acquisition of a CRO there.

Dr Chetan Tamhankar, chief operating officer, SIRO said, “The deal, which is in the last stage, will be finalised in the next 6-8 weeks, but the financials cannot be revealed now.” He did not name the target company either.

This move is part of the company’s strategy to create about 7-8 SIRO centres in Europe and a similar number in the Asia-Pacific region. “Most of these centres would be set up through acquisitions and we have already done our initial assessments in the Asia-Pacific region,” Tamhankar said.

In the Asia-Pacific, SIRO has finalised centres in Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Korea.

SIRO is also investing $10 million in the next three years to strengthen its IT infrastructure. It is implementing a new IT framework, comprising Oracle’s life sciences application running on Sun Microsystems’ hardware, which will provide a streamlined system for managing large volumes of patient data.

SIRO plans to spend close to $3 million in the first year to establish the IT framework in its operations.

Source : DNA