BioClinica continued to grow its burgeoning eClinical division with the acquisition of clinical trial management software (CTMS) company TranSenda for an estimated $2.5 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, BioClinica is purchasing substantially all of the assets of TranSenda for 577,960 shares of BioClinica unregistered common stock at closing. For 2010, BioClinica expects TranSenda to contribute $1 million in service revenue and an operating loss of $500,000. BioClinica’s revenues in 2009 were $57.4 million. The company is forecasting revenues between $61 and $65 million in 2010.

TranSenda president Robert Webber will stay on with BioClinica, working with the president of the company’s eClinical division to sell and develop CTMS solutions. Approximately half of TranSenda’s 20 employees will stay on with the company, according to BioClinica president and CEO Mark Weinstein, and TranSenda’s Bellevue, Wash., headquarters will remain open. BioClinica now has 460 employees.

The purchase of TranSenda gives BioClinica its first foray into CTMS services.

“There are people who have said, ‘We have CTMS,’ and what they really have is electronic data capture with some reporting on the background,” Weinstein said. “We did not have anything as a pure-play CTMS, so this is a very nice addition for us. One of the things that we’ve understood very clearly in this whole eClinical space is that it’s hard to tell what will be your entry product for a given client. But if they’re all really put together in the right way, the more entry points I can have into clients, the more I can bring my other applications to bear behind it. So, we see it adding to the entry points; we see it as a very nice add-on to a lot of our EDC clients.”

The TranSenda deal is the latest in a number of purchases BioClinica has made since acquiring Phoenix Data Systems in 2008 and announcing plans to focus on building its eClinical portfolio. Last September, BioClinica acquired technology company Tourtellotte Solutions. The same month, the company purchased the CardioNow unit of Agfa Healthcare, an acquisition that gave BioClinica the ability to offer electronic transmission of medical images for multisite clinical trials.

Weinstein hinted that more deals are on the horizon but said each company would be carefully chosen for what it might bring to BioClinica’s existing offerings.

“When we look at companies, we’re not looking necessary at the established revenue that they have. We’re looking more at is what is their philosophy, what is the quality of the product and the technology...  TranSenda, in particular, has spent a lot of time and resources developing their product,” Weinstein said.

TranSenda’s product is a suite of web-based Office-Smart CTMS solutions and patent-pending integration technologies that work with Microsoft tools to help customers manage clinical trials.

“When we looked across the continuum at various parts of the eClinical suite, one thing that we saw is that from the clinical trial management side, as far as pure-play CTMS solutions, there are several very large players. Those are million-dollar installs—very expensive systems, very big systems, fairly legacy-oriented, too, as far as how they’re put together. Our belief is that a lot more research over time is going to be done by the small to medium-sized pharma, and we talked to them about needing something to help organize their studies and manage their studies from the administrative perspective—none of them are going to step up to that million-dollar product.”

TranSenda’s product, according to Weinstein, is simple for companies to install and use with just basic knowledge of Microsoft’s familiar Office tools, such as Outlook, Excel and Word.