Jacksonville, Fla.-based site group JaxResearch Systems and Wilmington, N.C.-based recruiting company Inclinix together are launching a new site group called Encore Integrated Clinical Research.  

According to Michael Koren, founder and CEO of JaxResearch and now CEO of Encore, the new group, once ramped up, will be an affiliation of independent clinical research sites that share SOPs and a technology platform.

Koren said he’s currently in discussions with several sites about joining. Most are in the U.S., though one is in the Caribbean Basin. JaxReseach is the umbrella company for Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research (JCCR), which already has seven sites in Florida and one in Panama. JCCR will be part of Encore.

Said Koren, the model marries Inclinix’s recruiting technology—some of which involves applications that use Google Maps and public database information regarding 1572s—with robust databases that Encore will keep on each study done by each site. Thus, the two will combine their site-mining information to offer sponsors a new way do site selection and recruit.

JCCR and Inclinix had been talking for a year. “We started comparing notes and saw that there was a very, very interesting synergy,” said Koren. “They were building from the top down and we were building from bottom up and we decided to meet in the middle.”

Tobin Geatz, CEO and co-founder of Inclinix, and now also Encore’s president and COO, said, “Pairing research sites with patient recruitment expertise is essential in today’s environment. Autonomous outside service specialists inherently add costs and delays. Marrying them internally through Encore makes perfect sense and complements capabilities to deliver timely results at reasonable costs.”

The multi-specialty JCCR was launched in 1997, has a network of about 100 physicians, and has conducted more than 1,400 studies. Inclinix is 11 years old and in addition to its Wilmington headquarters has offices in Annapolis, Md., and Gothenburg, Sweden.

--Suz Redfearn