altMadrid (Spain) and Ghent (Belgium), March 3 2020 – Pivotal today announced the acquisition of Akcelis BVBA, a leading full-service provider of patient enrollment and retention solutions for clinical trials in the life sciences industry.

The acquisition promises to fundamentally redefine the entire patient recruitment lifecycle. Patient recruitment is a well-known bottleneck in clinical trials as Sponsors can experience challenges across many therapeutic areas. United by a common culture, Akcelis brings the right experience to Pivotal to recruit and retain a unique patient population for difficult-to-recruit trials.

“This acquisition fits perfectly with our commitment to bringing innovation to the clinical development process to deliver efficiencies for our clients,” said Lidia Farr, VP Corporate Development and Finance at Pivotal. “Akcelis will bring advanced, proprietary and analytics-driven technology and services to customize the most efficient and cost-effective approach to significantly improve site selection and patient enrollment and retention strategies for our clients´ clinical trials. As we focus on delivering this value for our customers, we are pleased to welcome our new colleagues to Pivotal to become part of our solution-oriented culture and help advance drug development to improve patient lives.”

Providing analytics-driven services to many large and mid-sized pharmaceutical companies, Akcelis manages the entire patient recruitment lifecycle, from recruitment to enrollment to retention. These services utilize innovative, proprietary and highly predictive software analytics to customize the most efficient and cost-effective approach to recruiting patients for a customer's clinical trial.

“Pivotal’s expertise in clinical research and Akcelis’ patient-centric approach to accelerate patient recruitment are the winning combination for scientifically elegant and patient-friendly clinical trials,” said Barbara D’haene and Nathalie Niclaus, Akcelis Managing Directors and Founders. “We look forward to positively impacting Pivotal’s clinical research excellence by implementing innovative digital patient recruitment strategies.”

The integration of Akcelis will allow Pivotal to increase its service offering and provide its current and future clients with patient recruitment experts who can contribute their expertise, advice and solid track record to provide quality accelerated patient recruitment strategies across prospective clinical trials.