Things can take some time, and sometimes they happen very quickly. A rescue project can be made, a decision can be made in a week. If it’s a large development program with a new asset in a significant indication, that could take three months to six months, really, depending on the individual customer, on their circumstances, on whether they’re raising money or not. I don’t see any much difference between large pharma and between biotech. Sometimes the biotechs take a fair bit of time on these things. Possibly they’re a little faster in terms of making decisions. But I’m not sure I noticed too much of a difference on that front. And I certainly haven’t noticed any elongation of decision velocity over the last quarter or two. I think, that’s continued at about the same rate as normal.
Justin Bowers: Understood. Yeah. I was just thinking in terms of the IRA — impact of the IRA and the rate environment last year and how that changed so quickly, but I’ll take the rest offline. Appreciate the question.
Steve Cutler: Okay. Thanks, Justin.
Operator: Please stand by for your next question. The next question is from David Windley at Jefferies. Please go ahead.
David Windley: Hi. Thanks for getting me in. My first question, Steve, you’ve both mentioned a couple of times about large pharma and FSO being strong to start off the year. You also mentioned the client renewal on that front. I wondered if those are one in the same, or if the large pharma and FSO uplift is broader than just that one client renewal. Maybe you could give us some color around that?
Steve Cutler: Well, David, the particular renewal that we’ve had is particularly in full service, so that’s certainly the case. But I think the — I think, it goes the full service sort of comeback, if that’s the way to put it, goes a bit beyond that one customer. Typically, in our industry, we see a little bit swings and roundabouts and the pendulum goes one way and comes back the other. I think a year or so ago, we were seeing pushed more towards functional. I think, that’s now starting to come back and we’re seeing maybe a little bit more of a — I wouldn’t say it’s a tidal wave or a tsunami, but there is probably an attenuation of that push towards FSP and perhaps it’s coming back a little bit on the full service. What we probably are seeing more than anything is an increase in these, what we call, these blended models, where particularly large pharma, of course, want to do, or want to have the facility to do both, both a more functional approach and a more full service approach, if that makes sense.
So, on a project, they might do their data management and medical writing or stats or whatever through a functional service agreement, but the clinical and the project management for the particular trial of the particular program would be more on a full service basis. So, those — and we feel like we’re very well positioned to be able to accommodate those sorts of solutions. We are the biggest on the FSP provider and we obviously have a very significant footprint in full service as well. So, our ability to put those models together is, I think, unprecedented in the industry. And so, we add that — and we add our technology and our site networks to it, we can put together a really compelling offering for these large pharma customers.
David Windley: Great, thanks. And then switching subjects, following up on some comments around data strategy. And you talked about tokenization. I guess, I’m thinking about your internal Symphony asset, but probably also reliance on external data assets. And maybe you could just comment on your current thoughts on data strategy and then also kind of how critical is data versus maybe the analytics, what you do with the data, how you bring the data to the sites, things like that, and maybe put — talk about what is your data strategy currently? And then how important is the data strategy in the context of actually delivering at the site level? Thanks.
Steve Cutler: Sure. Let me start with the tokenization. The Symphony business that we have within the organization is a critical part of our business from the tokenization level. And I think — I’m really excited about this tokenization, because I think it gives us the ability to follow to up patients in a very cost effective manner for an extended period of time, well beyond the clinical trial. So, if you think about as we get into more of these obesity type trials, where we have to treat thousands of patients over an extended period of time, and the ability to collect data very cost effectively with them, I think, offers us a huge opportunity and offers our customers a huge opportunity. You think if back in the day, when those of you few old enough to remember the Vioxx challenges around cardiovascular events in the painkillers.
If they’d been able to tokenize a lot of those patients, they’d have had been able to put in context those cardiovascular events and potentially had a different outcome. And that’s the way I’m thinking about the ability for us to tokenize patients in the — in this obesity space, in the diabetes space, where we’re doing back again to some of these really large scale clinical trials. We’ve been away a bit from these large scale clinical trials in the industry. We got into rare diseases and very specific, small 100 patient studies were big studies. Now, I think the opportunity going forward is to get into some of these really large ones. And I think our ability to tokenize these patients and to follow them up and to provide that data to customers on a long term basis is really exciting.
In terms of our data strategy, we continue to not necessarily want to own all of the data. We own — we obtain data from a number of different sources. Symphony is really important part of that. But we have our lab, we have our lab data. We have a number of external sources of data around from site line and organizations like that. We have our clinical — our trial management system. And what we’re bringing together from a number of different sources is an ability through our technology then to identify patients for trials and to find those patients and get those patients into clinical trials. One of our initiatives on the innovation space is through an organization called Veradigm, where we can actually utilize their electronic medical records and go out and find patients and bring patients in and have patients referred to our clinical trials.
