BBK Worldwide, a clinical trial marketing firm, and CROee, the first consulting Japanese CRO specializing in patient recruitment, have created a jointly-owned U.S.-based company, BBK + CROee.

Collaborators since 2010, they formed the entity to provide the cultural and marketing expertise necessary to engage the Japanese pharmaceutical industry and, in turn, to support global pharma in its quest for drug approvals in Japan.

CROee's Daisuke Maki and Takateru Inokawa will serve as directors, along with BBK's founding principal Bonnie A. Brescia and director Steven Fleishman. Kiyoshi Aoyagi has been named President and will lead all U.S.-based CROee initiatives. BBK + CROee will hire sales and marketing support in the near term to support growth.

The two companies have been collaborating on multinational patient recruitment and retention campaigns as part of the Patient Recruitment Global Alliance—a network of partner organizations founded and managed by BBK. Leveraging the successes achieved through that collaboration, BBK and CROee have developed an integrated technological infrastructure that supports proactive contingency action planning through access to real-time recruitment data tracking and management, and at the same time provides critical interfaces for referral management and enrollment reporting for Japanese-speaking audiences.

The first fully integrated product offering combines BBK's robust TrialCentralNet recruitment platform with CROee's iPass system. TCN streamlines, organizes and provides on-demand analysis of all recruitment and retention data, processes and activities. The combination offers referral tracking and reporting in a user-friendly portal. The fully integrated system will be available in late June, with additional integrations to be available by the end of the year.

"We look forward to broadening our reach here in the US, and to working with BBK in this new capacity to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies conduct more efficient clinical research worldwide," said Aoyagi.

"CROee has long shared our commitment to ensuring that all teams within drug development have seamless access to the enrollment data and metrics they need to drive efficiencies—so working with their team in this way is an exciting step toward that end," said Brescia.

The Patient Recruitment Global Alliance is comprised of vetted, trained, and experienced clinical trial communications and technology providing patient recruitment and retention solutions for complex multinational enrollment challenges. Partner companies serve as regional hub leaders, with member firms offering functional- or country-specific resources. Partners include Jsure Health, Southern Star Research and QuoMedic.

For more on this story, see next Monday’s CWWeekly.