Ceiba Solutions Gets Boost from NZ Government

New Zealand Government Invests in Cambridge Company
Ceiba Solutions

New Zealand & Cambridge, MA - Ceiba Solutions, an IT company specializing in solutions for Life Science customers, announced today that The New Zealand Government’s Foundation for Research, Science and Technology is making an investment of $NZ600,000 to help Ceiba create a drug development information ‘dashboard.’

Ceiba Solutions, which was launched in New Zealand in April 2006, and opened its USA headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts the following August, recognized the complexities, and the multi-company effort, to bring new-age drugs and medical devices to market. Drug discovery and development today require a mammoth effort to continually gather and manage data across a network of independent Life Science companies. These can include contract laboratories and research groups, contract manufacturers, dedicated testing facilities and a host of specialists.

Ceiba Solutions, with its IT development team in New Zealand, has laid out a design to tackle the problem of shared data and collaborative processes across multiple companies with a unique approach that combines its proprietary technology for data and application integration with some of the latest internet innovations.

Although there are many potential applications, the initial goal is to produce a ‘dashboard’ that provides an instant window into the inventory status of any product in development. An outside group of experts in the Life Science community is being formed to help Ceiba refine the scope of a solution that can be quickly prototyped to showcase the technology.

“Ceiba has presented a compelling case for this solution, which includes a very creative, collaborative process that involves members of the Life Science business community to help guide the work,” said Craig Adams, NZ Business Manager.

“Our exposure to the information technology issues of drug discovery and development has provided us a unique opportunity to come up with pragmatic ways to bridge different software and data standards into a common model. We are also sensitized to the economic constraints that have hit the Life Science industry as it has many others,” said Lindsay Rewcastle, Ceiba Solutions CEO.

With a prototype planned for March of 2010, the resulting solution will involve remote hosting of data and secure access, with minimal, if any, computer infrastructure investment by participating Life Science companies. The Dashboard Advisory Group, aided by the Ceiba Agile (cAgile) collaboration software, will help members describe the requirements. Participating Life Science advisors will have the option to serve as early testers.