U.K.-based Quotient Bioresearch acquired an Edinburgh clinical research facility to supplement the company’s growing clinical research business.

The Cambridgeshire, England, company purchased the facility from Charles River Laboratories last week for an undisclosed sum. The new facility will combine with Pharmaceutical Profiles, a Nottingham, UKbased facility acquired by Quotient in December, to form Quotient Clinical, Quotient’s new strategic business unit. This is Quotient’s sixth acquisition in three years.

“Quotient wasn’t able to participate in clinical services at all until the acquisition of Pharmaceutical Profiles and now of the Edinburgh unit. I think combining those two together to form Quotient Clinical is really primarily just a way of communicating our commitment to that area of the R&D process,” said Mark Egerton, managing director of Quotient Clinical and former CEO of Pharmaceutical Profiles. “The services that are offered from the two facilities are very complementary, so Quotient Clinical will be able to offer full service support to take customers from the initial first in- human study through to the proof of concept in a small patient group study.”

Quotient Clinical now has 160 employees (75 from the Charles River acquisition) with a clinical capacity of 100 beds across the two sites in Edinburgh and Nottingham. The company conducts 50 to 60 clinical trials a year, Egerton said, and the backlog for Quotient’s clinical services has increased 300% in the past year.

“We’re going to spend some immediate focus on making sure that we are selling all of our services to all of our customers. The old Pharmaceutical Profiles business got 60% of its business from customers based in the United States whereas the Edinburgh facility got 70% of its business from customers based in Europe, so we’ve got a strong overlapping customer base,” Egerton said.

The company will spend the next six months coalescing the two sites’ services into three service areas: first-in-man through proof of concept, drug development optimization and a service that Quotient calls 14C enabled drug development.