PPD today announced they it entered into an agreement with ProtonMedia to jointly develop a new virtual clinical trial training solution that will improve the cost effectiveness, speed and quality of clinical trial training for life sciences organizations.

The solution will integrate ProtonMedia’s ProtoSphere virtual collaboration environment with PPD Adaptive Solutions, PPD’s suite of data and information technology solutions. The combination will be a virtual collaborative environment built around PPD’s customizable, flexible and integrated technology solutions to advance clinical research programs. PPD will showcase ProtoSphere to its client base at the 20th Annual Partnerships in Clinical Trials conference being held March 30 to April 1 in Phoenix.

“A crucial step to enhancing the quality of site management and clinical monitoring is to improve the way we train clinical research associates to monitor clinical trials,” said Mike Wilkinson, executive vice president and chief information officer at PPD in a press release. “ProtonMedia is the ideal virtual collaboration technology provider because of ProtoSphere’s strong ability to integrate rapidly with our solutions, and ProtonMedia’s commitment to Microsoft Corp. technologies, which are pervasive across life sciences companies today.”

ProtoSphere is the only virtual collaboration environment built with Microsoft technology and is one of the leading virtual collaboration environments in the area of life sciences.

“This partnership between ProtonMedia and PPD is an example of two organizations coming together in a way that has great synergy for Microsoft's Life Sciences customers,” said Les Jordan, chief technology strategist, Microsoft Life Sciences, in the release. “The integration of ProtoSphere and PPD Adaptive Solutions will help to deliver a positive impact to life sciences organizations seeking to create a more collaborative and cost-effective R&D framework.”