"Your Journey, Our Mission": PAREXEL Launches New Brand Platform To Strengthen Client Relationships

By Ed Miseta, Chief Editor, Clinical Leader

Josef von Rickenbach, founder and CEO, PAREXEL

Attempting to simplify the journey of sponsors from the drug discovery process through to new treatments for patients, biopharmaceutical services provider PAREXEL is announcing the launch of a new initiative. The company’s promise to bio and pharma firms, “Your Journey, Our Mission”, was put in place to demonstrate its commitment to enhance client opportunities.

PAREXEL has been working on this rebranding idea for more than two years. According to the company’s founder and CEO, Josef von Rickenbach, the process involved a lot of soul searching and examining of where the company and the industry were evolving, as well as the expectations of its clients. The goal was to understand how the strategies and visions of pharma could be best served by the companies it selected as partners.

“We determined that one of the biggest challenges faced by our customers was the highly complex system that must be navigated to get a drug through to approval,” notes Rickenbach. “We believe this to be true of the larger companies as well as the smaller ones. We felt a partnering company with the proper insight and global reach should have a mission of helping them as much as possible with that quest.”

The first segment of the tagline refers to the journey of the sponsor from drug discovery through to distributing the approved medicine to patients in need. The later part refers to PAREXEL accepting the responsibility for that journey and making it their mission to see it through to success. The branding effort is coupled with an internal branding that will focus on a high-performance culture where employees accept a client’s mission as their own.

PAREXEL expects to use three of its top proficiencies to accomplish this goal, namely global expertise, the ability to deal with (and not shy away from) complex challenges, and the establishment of strategic partnerships. Combined together, Rickenbach believes they will demonstrate the importance that strategic partnerships play in the drug development process.

“All companies today need to play on a global field,” he says. “During the development phases, it would be a tremendous shortcoming to not take advantage of the opportunities a global reach can bring to the table, especially in terms of speed and clinical development. Many pharma companies, both large and small, may not have the same reach of its CROs. They may also not have the same expertise, especially when it comes to completing trials and all of the regulatory aspects of it. Once the drug gains regulatory approval, it needs to get to worldwide market in the shortest amount of time possible. An effective global reach can significantly facilitate that process.”

Rickenbach notes PAREXEL’s eClinical technology platform and its work with biosimilars has enabled the company to solve complex client issues in new and innovative ways. The company’s work with strategic partners has helped to optimize the entire biopharmaceutical drug development process and led to lower costs and stronger sponsor/CRO relationships.  

Adding to the importance of strategic partnerships is another underlying trend: pharmaceutical companies are undergoing significant change. According to Rickenbach, their journey is no longer one of just getting drugs approved. In many cases, these firms need to re-invent themselves.  He believes CROs need to be a part of that process and ensure they can spend less time worrying about how their trials are being conducted. “It’s our job to take that concern off their backs,” he adds. “In the eyes of the FDA, large pharma companies are now, and will always be, the guarantor of quality. On that point the FDA will not let them off the hook. CROs and CMOs need to realize that as partners, you are joined with them at the hip. Our mission must be ensuring that they succeed.”

In a second announcement, PAREXEL announced it is rebranding its technology subsidiary, Perceptive Informatics, which will now be known as PAREXEL Informatics. The company provides an eClinical platform and other clinical development technology solutions to clients. The effort is being undertaken to underscore PAREXEL’s ability to offer a seamless, end-to-end technology and services portfolio.

At the strategic level, Rickenbach notes there are two major trends playing out in the pharmaceutical industry. The first is the trend towards more outsourcing, especially in clinical. The second is the move to digitization in clinical research. “If you go back 10 years ago, most of the work we did in clinical research was done manually, oftentimes with paper and pencil,” he says. “Increasingly it is all done electronically with fairly sophisticated software tools. The separate nature of the two businesses has now ceased to exist. By bringing these internally-developed tools under the PAREXEL name, we are delivering the message that we are now a full-fledged eCRO.”

Patients are more electronically enabled as well, not just in the U.S. but in the second and third world as well. Patients around the world with access to a cell phone will open up whole new opportunities for capturing and recording data, which Rickenbach believes will enrich the data collection process and help keep patients more engaged.