Quintiles to support Intarcia diabetes programme

Quintiles has agreed a new partnership arrangement with Intarcia Therapeutics pertaining to the development of a potentially groundbreaking diabetes drug.

The biopharmaceutical services provider is set to become the financial and strategic partner for the global clinical development of ITCA 650, Intarcia's new type 2 diabetes therapy, which involves the continuous subcutaneous delivery of exenatide.

Under the terms of the arrangement, Quintiles' capital solutions group will provide a combination of equity, product and operational investments, as well as deploying its expertise in the organisation of multiple parallel phase III studies.

Should the treatment be developed successfully under this scheme, it would be the first once-yearly injection-free GLP-1 therapy for type 2 diabetes and would benefit a wide array of patients.

Dennis Gillings, Quintiles' founder, chairman and chief executive officer, said: "This alliance illustrates Quintiles' ability to bring financial, human and intellectual capital together to address a customer's complex strategic challenges."

This comes in the same week that Quintiles also announced the launch of a new subsidiary called Kun Tuo, a contract research organisation based in China that aims to serve the needs of the local market.