Saratoga Springs, N.Y.-based contract research organization (CRO) Criterium has opened two new offices in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Yavne, Israel. Criterium made its announcement recently at the 43rd Drug Information Asociation (DIA) annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Criterium, founded in 1991,  has 91 employees. It has offices in New York, California, Florida, India, South Africa, The Netherlands, Russia and Israel. The company began conducting clinical trials in Asia, South America and Europe in 1997.

Its newest office in Russia has three full-time employees and the office in Israel has one, Ayelet Bar-Dov, clinical liaison/business development associate. Prior to joining Criterium, Ms. Bar-Dov worked as regional sales representative at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.

Criterium’s trial management model, which employs technology flexibility and a centralized workflow process, makes its expansion into various emerging markets in clinical research possible.

“We’re tying it all together with our technology and our workflow. We fit the technology to the region. Technology is a tool, but workflow makes it work. Our hub is in New York. All data comes into it and goes back out to sites, then we manage the monitors using real data that comes in,” John Hudak, president and founder of Criterium, told CWWeekly at DIA.

Hudak’s first considerations when establishing a new office are the regulatory process, patient population and quality sites. Criterium has plans for further growth that include the Pacific Rim and South America.

“We have plans [to open offices in] New Zealand and South America. The regulatory process has to be reasonable. We’ve done work in Chile and just finished work in Ecuador,” said Hudak. “In today’s global studies, it is more important than ever to adopt an agile approach, which means finding the appropriate patients and combining various data collection tools with a standardized, centralized workflow, which allows timelines to stay on track and costs to be kept in line.”