Ten Years of eClinical: 10 Key Company Milestones

The eClinical Anniversary Blog Series

It’s been a decade since eClinical Solutions was formed as an independent company. The past 10 years have been exhilarating and humbling as a co-founder of the company. We’ve accomplished so much in this span of time, and yet there is still so much more we strive to achieve. As we celebrated this anniversary year, I along with president and co-founder Bob Arnesen have been reflecting on some of our biggest highlights over the past decade. Pausing to look back on these milestones offers a chance to recognize as a team how far we’ve come, and how much the industry and nature of drug development have changed over the last decade. It also fuels our entrance into the next decade of eClinical Solutions, and energizes our team about the incredible opportunities ahead — we are just getting started.

1. 2012 — Founding of eClinical Solutions & the Start of elluminate

eClinical Solutions was founded in November, 2012. Prior to that, eClinical Solutions existed as a division of technology and consulting leader Eliassen Group, focused on providing clinical data management services. The clinical data cloud platform now known as elluminate^® had recently launched as the clinical data repository (CDR) eGrex, and we saw the potential for this software solution to transform experiences interacting with clinical data – offering greater control, access and efficiency. We saw an opportunity for technology to help solve the industry’s growing clinical data challenges, and had a vision of frictionless data flows enabled by cloud and digital platforms. But building technology was not core to Eliassen’s business. We also saw the synergies in the combination of our software platform together with the Eliassen eClinical Solutions division’s deep expertise in clinical data management. In late 2012, Bob Arnesen and I pitched Eliassen Group to break eClinical Solutions out as its own entity. We were lucky enough to get the go-ahead from Eliassen and have Bharat Agrawal invest in our vision, granting us the opportunity to expand our expertise in clinical data management solutions. Boosted by the support of Bharat and our initial core team, this was also the start of a strong partnership between myself and Bob as co-founders, a business collaboration and friendship that continues today as we lead the company through the combination of our unique strengths. During that period, the eClinical Solutions that the industry now knows today was born. Soon after our founding in 2012, we relaunched our data aggregation solution, changing its name from eGrex to elluminate. Our mission as a company was to make clinical research data acquisition and analysis easy and intelligent to help bring new treatments to patients faster, and has remained unchanged, continuing to guide us today. Driven by our mission and founding vision, the elluminate platform and eClinical Solutions’ clinical data services have evolved over the past decade to add numerous capabilities. Today, the combination of our software and services enables streamlined clinical data workflows, and provides clients with a digital data infrastructure and analytics foundation that powers critical efficiencies across the data lifecycle.

The Beginning

The Founders

The Core

2. 2012 — Medidata Technology Partnership

eClinical Solutions was one of Medidata’s first accredited partners to support Rave, achieving Services accreditation in 2008 when the company was still a division of Eliassen. In 2012, eClinical Solutions came on board as an early partner in the Medidata Technology Partner Program, which was created to “advance interoperability and data sharing across clinical trial technologies.” Because of this early partnership and shared vision of system interoperability, clients leveraging both Medidata Rave EDC and elluminate benefit from bidirectional integration between the two technologies – for automated, seamless transfer of data between the two systems, and real-time reporting and analysis of all study data in one place. Not only did pursuing this partnership align with our core values, it furthered our commitment to working alongside top players in the space who share our goals of streamlining the end-to-end clinical trial process.

As a Medidata-accredited services partner, eClinical Solutions also made an early decision to commit entirely to the Rave Clinical Cloud for data acquisition and build, including configuration of EDC (electronic data capture) and other Rave systems like Coder and RTSM. eClinical provides clinical data management and biometrics services for clients using a myriad of data acquisition technologies and data sources, and advise on all tech components in overall data management planning. However when it comes to EDC study database configuration, specializing in Rave enables us to provide the deep expertise and experience needed to offer our clients optimal database configuration. Since the onset of our company, Medidata has remained a trusted partner, and to date we’ve grown to achieve a total of eight Medidata accreditations, including our latest accreditation in Medidata’s Site Cloud: End of Study (EOS) platform.

3. 2013 — Opening of India Office

In 2013 we opened an eClinical Solutions office in Bangalore, India in response to demand in the region and to support our global operations, scale and growing book of business. Collaboration with our team in India ensures that we’re consistently delivering the most efficient outputs to our clients and partners. This milestone set the stage for future international expansion. Since then, the team in India has grown rapidly, from a handful of people to nearly 100 strong today. In the spring of 2022, the team moved to a newly designed and branded office space in the International Tech Park of Bangalore, the largest tech park in Bangalore and a hub housing numerous world technology leaders. Under the leadership of Venu Mallarapu, announced as eClinical vice president of strategy and global operations in 2022, our India location will continue to be a valued and strategic team critical to eClinical Solutions’ global operations. As our office and team there continue to grow, we remain particularly focused on creating opportunities for personal and professional development in the region as a top place to work.

4. 2016 — 100 Team Members

In early 2016, four years after our launch, we were proud to welcome our 100^th eClinical team member. While we were keenly aware of our rapid company growth and sustained success, this milestone helped us gain a fuller understanding of the impact we were making in the life sciences space. By working alongside industry giants, we were able to create more job opportunities for those passionate about our mission to streamline the clinical trials process and help our industry bring therapies to patients faster. We’ve quadrupled our employee base since then, and continue to look for more talented individuals to join our team. If you’re interested in learning more about our current job opportunities, visit our Careers page.

5. 2017 — elluminate Wins SCDM 2017 NextGen Technology Innovation Award

Just ahead of 2017, we launched our revolutionary elluminate module, Mapper. We were a first mover with this solution’s capabilities. Mapper enables SAS or Clinical Programmers to perform complex transformations via a visual, drag-and-drop interface turning disparate data streams into submission-ready CDISC SDTM and analysis datasets.

In the fall of 2017, eClinical Solutions was recognized when elluminate won the Society of Clinical Data Management (SCDM) NextGen Technology Innovation Award, no doubt in large part to the innovation shown in our latest Mapper module. Mapper would prove to be a game-changer for our overall platform and a set of capabilities ahead of their time, positioning us as a breakout technology in this growing space.

This innovation was largely made possible by our Chief Technology Officer, Sam Anwar. As the driver of this product development, he pushed elluminate further into the future. Sam’s cutting-edge engineering expertise and leadership have set our solutions apart since eClinical’s naissance. His mission to explore new technologies and find ways to advance the life sciences industry continue to push boundaries for elluminate today.

6. 2019 — Inaugural elluminate Engage Client Conference

In late 2019, we hosted our first elluminate Engage conference. We created the event to offer a collaborative environment for our forward-thinking elluminate clients to connect with each other and discuss tech’s role in the rapidly evolving clinical development process. The first event was a success, leading to groundbreaking conversations around the future of the space and clients sharing innovative ways to leverage elluminate in their operations.

Following our inaugural event in 2019, the pandemic required us to shift to two years in a virtual format. Despite the disruption, our Engage community continued to grow. In November of this year at elluminate Engage 2022, we returned to an in-person format for the first time since that initial event, welcoming over 150 attendees from over 60 client and partner companies. The elluminate user community we gathered included sponsor organizations across large pharma, mid-size and emerging biotech, and represented data stakeholders leading transformational change across the lifecycle, from systems IT to statistics and programming, clinical operations, and data management. The energy from our community this year was tangible as we collectively look to the digital future of clinical trials and see elluminate as critical foundation for organizations in this midst of this industry shift.

7. 2020 — Growth Equity Investment from Summit Partners

In early 2020, just before the pandemic brought both uncertainty and unprecedented attention on the life sciences and clinical trials space, we were fortunate to receive an investment from Summit Partners to help support our expansion goals. We were extremely grateful and excited, but we couldn’t have known what was ahead and just how crucial this partnership would be. As we all know now, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and clinical trials experienced unprecedented disruption, along with acceleration in the search for a vaccine. This moment in time was pivotal, as global and industry impacts pushed clinical development out of the status quo by necessity. As a community, we were tested and proved our ability to modernize, digitize and move at the speed of science. Our Summit Partners investment enabled us to double down on our digital data vision and drive global brand awareness for our elluminate platform and services. Summit’s deep expertise in the life sciences and HCIT markets helped guide us through that next phase of growth.

8. 2020 — Expansion into European Market

Market demand was rapidly growing in Europe in early 2020— no doubt propelled by global momentum for next generation data and analytics platforms. Just ahead of 2020, a 2019 Gartner report saw “46% of life science CIOs state that BI/data analytics capabilities [would] receive the largest amount of new or additional investments.” With growing European demand for solutions and services like ours and the recent funding from Summit Partners, we were able to further scale the company and expand our international footprint into the European market.

9. 2020 — 100 elluminate Clients

2020 was a pivotal year — following our investment and global scaling, we closed out the year with a more than 40% annual license growth of our elluminate platform, bringing adoption of the platform to more than 100 life sciences companies worldwide. We are proud to drive efficiency for the more than 1,500 elluminate users and help our growing client base keep up with evolving industry demands, from the predicted explosion of data to the continued pressure for accelerated trial timelines.

10. 2022 — Always Looking Forward with New Capabilities

As we look ahead, we’re excited for what’s to come and continue to expand our platform and services to help our industry gain unprecedented efficiency across the clinical trial value chain. So far this year, we’ve launched several new platform capabilities and services, and we have much more in the pipeline that we can’t wait to share. As one of our many new offerings, we recently launched the elluminate Statistical Computing Environment (SCE), which helps accelerate and automate statistical analyses in a landscape where the amount of data and data sources are continuously growing. By leveraging SCE’s overall integration with the elluminate platform, our clients can get in front of new clinical development challenges to streamline the production of submission deliverables and increase programming and analysis efficiencies.

In clinical data services we continue to help our clients with evolving data management for this era of decentralization. We’re partnering with clients to assist in the design and build of their decentralized clinical trial (DCT) strategies and certifying our team in partner technologies for DCT study build. By leveraging the ever-growing elluminate platform and partnering to build trial strategies, we’re enabling our customers to accelerate their research while expanding into new areas that require expert, scalable clinical data services, like DCTs and personalized medicine. Since the beginning, we’ve operated with future vision and nimbleness, ensuring we’re ready for anything our clients may face. In the next decade, we plan to help our clients and partners continue to excel beyond what anyone could have imagined back in 2012.

Learn more about our company mission and history: About eClinical Solutions

Join us in the next decade of progress for life sciences: Careers at eClinical