An Irvine startup company’s graphics software product has landed in a clinical trial for a new anti-AIDS drug.
This is the first time that HighTower Software’s TowerView product has been used in a healthcare context, company officials said.
“For clinical trials, it can make an enormous difference,” said Ursula Schwuttke, HighTower’s founder, president and chief executive. “It can improve the quality of data analysis.”
TowerView converts data into 3-D visual displays. Parexel International Corp., a publicly traded contract research firm, is using TowerView to monitor patients in the study, said Dr. Alan Solinger, Parexel’s director of immunology drug trials.
Parexel is based in Waltham, Mass., and provides contract research, medical marketing and consulting to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. Parexel reported earnings of $15.2 million on revenue of $378.2 million in the fiscal year ended June 30.
TowerView enabled Parexel researchers to monitor simultaneously the health conditions of more than 140 people participating in the AIDS drug trial, which is being conducted by Parexel for an unidentified client. Among other things, TowerView analyzed patients’ laboratory results, ranging from potassium levels to white blood cell counts.
Solinger, who works out of Parexel’s San Diego office, said the software cuts the time spent assessing patients down from “four to five hours to a 30- to 45-minute chore. It’s much quicker.”
He added that the software also enables him to find out more quickly if a patient is having trouble with the medication.
Speeding the Process
Adam Whizin, HighTower’s director of business development, said that using TowerView for data analysis could help researchers close their clinical trials and get pharmaceuticals to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sooner.
“We had an in through our board,” Whizin said of the Parexel contract. Specifically, outside director Sona Wang introduced the company to Solinger and Parexel.
HighTower was founded in 1997, after Schwuttke licensed visual technology from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Schwuttke, a Brown University-educated engineer, spent more than a decade researching the application.
HighTower received first-round financing of $1.9 million in 1998 and secured a second round of $11 million in venture capital funding at the start of August, Schwuttke said. She has set a revenue goal for HighTower of $4 million this year, adding she hopes the company can reach $20 million in revenue before possibly going public. n
