Plus-Project
High-Quality Programming and Biostatistics Consultancy Services

It’s a no brainer that CROs play an increasingly significant role in preclinical and clinical research. The recent wave is driven by several factors, including difficulty in aligning the varied clinical functional needs with multi-product and multi-phased developmental pipelines and overall high development costs, which have led to pharmaceutical organisations outsourcing either their entire clinical development operations or parts of it to CROs. Pharma companies have come to realise that having the right CRO partner allows them to not only streamline both speed and efficiencies for many aspects of the drug discovery activities but also address the gaps created from downsizing their internal efforts.

With today’s pharma marketplace brimming with numerous CROs that enable pharma organisations to go from concept to proof-of-principle and even beyond, finding the right partner that best fits a business’ needs can be quite challenging. However, it is worth noting when a firm has been able to maintain a leading position and consistently deliver high-quality services across all aspects of clinical trial consultancy, empowering its clients to bring their products to the market faster. Enter Plus- Project, an employee-owned biostatistics CRO based in the UK, Poland, and Ukraine, which provides IR-35 compliant programming and biostatistics consultancy services to clients of all sizes via a functional service provider (FSP) or flexible worker models. Plus-project’s services span functional service provisioning, flexible resourcing, biostatistics, and CDISC and CSR reporting. Michael Wall, chairman, Plus-Project, says, “We have experience across most therapeutic areas, with industry-leading skills in the analysis of late-phase oncology trials using RECIST. We provide flexible resources to multiple customers, including two of the largest pharmaceutical companies and multiple smaller customers.”

Plus-Project was established in 2014 with just three employees and, today has expanded to over 40 and is continuing to grow to meet the increasing market demands. With a median of 16 years’ experience and access to resources across multiple countries, the firm delivers the most complex projects at competitive costs. Plus-Project provides leadership and study level support across multiple TAs and phases.

But what truly sets Plus- Project apart is that as an employee-owned CRO, the organisation embraces corporate fairness and social responsibility

These projects are either fully outsourced to Plus-Project, or, more commonly, the Plus-Project team works as an extension of the client’s existing teams on client systems.

But what truly sets Plus-Project apart is, as an employee-owned CRO, the organisation embraces corporate fairness and social responsibility. A majority of the firm is owned by its employees rather than private shareholders or external investors. “This ownership model enables us to take into account the interests of employees, customers and our supply chain when we make our business decisions,” explains Wall. “By placing our staff central to our success, we consistently deliver outstanding client services.”

Moving to the Employee Ownership model has benefitted Plus-Project tremendously in today’s COVID-19 hit world. Over the last 12 months, Plus-Project has had a staff attrition rate of zero, with the offer of employee ownership continuing to attract a flow of high-quality new recruits. The recent financial crisis and COVID-19 outbreak have resulted in a push for customers and employees to work with companies that share such ethical values, and, consequently, Plus-Project is seeing a significant increase in demand for its services.

Another notable aspect of the firm is its client relationships. Plus-Project has a talented team comprising Statisticians, CDISC subject matter experts, Clinical Programmers, and Client Managers, committed to providing outstanding quality services, resulting in exceptional levels of customer satisfaction. They are led and managed by Alison Wall, Plus-Project’s managing director, who helps maintain a lean team with low-cost overheads. “Customers often trust us to analyse their most difficult, or failing projects, where existing service providers have fallen short of the expected quality criteria,” mentions Alison. To cite an example, Plus-Project helped run the programming and statistics of a complex set of oncology trials on behalf of a large pharmaceutical company. The firm provided programming expertise covering the CDISC implementation of RECIST and provided both hands-on and leadership-level coverage of statistics to the client, which enabled them to attain desirable outcomes easily.

For the road ahead, Plus-Project has plans to expand internationally as well as grow its operations and is on target to double the size of the business in the next 24 months. Alongside, the company is also looking to partner with new customers. Through these nuanced efforts, Plus-Project is poised to grow in the pharmaceutical landscape while solving niche problems.