Company news

North Carolina-based Quintiles, a contract researcher for drug companies, will lease 12,000 square feet in the Pan Am building for the next five years in a move to get closer to Eli Lilly and Co., one of its major clients. The office, which initially will employ 50 people, is a collaborative project of the two companies, Quintiles spokesman Phil Bridges told the Triangle Business Journal. “The goal of the collaboration has been to develop an integrated approach to optimizing how [human drug] trials are conducted, eliminate costly inefficiencies and use ‘big data’ to drive better drug development decisions,” Bridges said. The office could employ as many as 65 by the end of the year.

Here’s one way to win over skeptical locals in your hometown market: spend $1 million. Indianapolis-based hospital system Indiana University Health, which took that name last year after being called Clarian, will give $1 million to Purdue University to help build a facility that will, in part, house a satellite campus of the IU School of Medicine. IU Health was formed in 1996 by a partnership between the IU medical school and Indianapolis’ Methodist Hospital. IU Health operates one of its hospitals, IU Health Arnett, in the back yard of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette. When they made the name change, IU Health executives acknowledged it might present challenges in Lafayette, but they said market research showed the name still was preferred to the vanilla Clarian.

The recent sale of a California-based medical device company sent some money back to Indiana. MindFrame Inc. was acquired for $75 million by Massachusetts-based Covidien Inc. That produced an undisclosed return for Indianapolis-based CHV Capital, the venture capital arm of the Indiana University Health hospital system as well as SV Life Sciences, a Boston-based venture capital firm that has received funds from the $58 million INext Fund raised by Indianapolis-based life sciences development group BioCrossroads. MindFrame develops devices for minimally invasive removal of blood clots from stroke patients. In addition to the cash from Indiana, the company also received technical help from students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute and some consulting advice from participants in the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. “Our relationship with CHV Capital and IU Health became an important element of creating value in the business and was a natural extension of our fund-of-fund relationship with BioCrossroads and INext,” said David Milne, managing director of SV Life Sciences.