



Gaea was established in 1994 as a clinical consultancy to assist in the clinical development plans, and as project management within Sponsors.
Gaea expanded to become a trial acceleration of enrolment company working at problem sites, that are common in many trials.
In 2010 Gaea became a full-service CRO in Europe, from the UK
In 2018 Gaea exited UK and moved European trial management within Estonia and Ukraine.
Gaea works with difficult to enrol trials and complex IMP in oncology, acute care, intensive care, and neurology.
We have also worked in C. difficile diarrhoea and would be happy to be involved again in the microbiome.
I grew up in commercial in Roche big pharma for many years. I was committed and passionate for the success of the company, but I experienced at first hand the issues from suboptimal clinical development.
In my experience through the 80’s and early 90’s in Roche HQ, oncology clinical trials were not well designed and executed, “compassionate use” was resultant regulatory dossiers were poor and so products were too late to be early in the drug class. Roche Affiliates were despairing of the HQ output. The result was obvious in declining revenue and the company was slipping down the global rankings and risked exiting the Top 10.
In my last four years in Roche in the early 90’s, when Amgen was a partner, I proposed that we move from their silo-based drug development to the principles of the “Thriving on Chaos” (Tom Peters) through creation of a venture team.
I was given Pharma Board approval and led what we named the Amgen-Roche Venture Team to bring Neupogen® (Filgrastim, G-CSF) from end of Phase II to all Roche and Amgen markets
In four thriving- on- chaos- years, the small team worked in a very complex partner relationship: Amgen HQ and affiliates – Roche HQ – Roche affiliates, taking filgrastim through two Phase III trials, through production in Roche, through regulatory as one of the first drugs through the centralised EU regulatory process, through pre-commercialisation against GM-CSF, and through national regulatory with 80 national launches by launch year plus four years .
Neupogen has changed the delivery of conventional chemotherapy, it is revolutionising high-dose chemotherapy, and made peak sales of $4 billion a year, to be a driver of the growth of Amgen.
We had to set the goal of being first CSF to market that could not be missed, and with the addition of the highest quality at the core of all we did, as to hit the time goal and fail on quality or not meeting market need would be a fail.
We were budget rich and resource poor. We worked as a small cross-functional team: everyone who joined made a personal commitment to the team as it was not about our own enrichment – we avoided working in a box called a job description – we worked without a CRO – we used experienced resources we could contract.
COVID 19 has shown that we live and work in ever more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.
There is still the fashion for patient centricity, but many protocols are of necessity with tightly defined inclusion criteria.
Despite ubiquitous outsourcing, and with many companies selling enrolment database solutions, increasing numbers of trials enrol slowly and with high patient dropout rate”.
Despite only nine CROs running ~60% of all outsourced clinical research, there isn’t an obvious increasing efficiency in the development process.
The iconic elephant families depend on the senior female, the matriarch, who shares her g experience for the family group survival. Gaea is Sharing our Experience to help Sponsors
With my working life in the healthcare industry, as Gaea CEO I want to be an active member of a project, to use my years of experience in clinical studies to bring trials faster through to completion, with quality at the core.
Gaea offers our services in an environment where the Big CROs provide huge size and claims of delivery from multiple offices, which is often taken as security by Sponsors. Giving all trial to a Big CRO makes life easier in selection. Size is necessary if it’s a Phase III trial in 1,000 patients. Size with Phase I in 30 or Phase II in 100 brings bureaucracy, complexity and results in loss of speed, and does not improve quality over a well – selected agile CRO. There is always the risk of Big CRO move of the A -team the Sponsor started with to more lucrative projects and switch in the CRO C -team, backed by contracts that are light on delivery penalties and long on escape clauses. The longer the trial takes the more it costs, and someone has to pay for the hours – if not in the bid, and not in the risk-based monitoring, finally in change orders where Big CRO have the financial and legal muscle to delay additional work, if the orders are not signed.
It’s an environment of rapidly increasing numbers of clinical trials chasing few patients willing to join more than 5000 trials were open with immuno-oncology drugs (as mono therapy and combination immune oncology) in 2020
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