Friday, September 17, 2004

Gift of the MAGI
By Pat French

Nina Cannon, Manager, Contracts Management, will be speaking later this month at the leading conference for clinical research contracts professionals: Contracting & Negotiating Clinical Trials.

Cannon’s talk is titled “The Other Agreements: Confidentiality, Master, Materials Transfer, Data Use, and More,” and she will be copresenting it with Stacy S. Switzer, Counsel for Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America. As the agenda states, “Confidentiality, master, and other agreements are not the poor relations of clinical trial agreements. The wise clinical research contract specialist knows when to use them and how to negotiate them.”

This twice-yearly international meeting, now in its 14th year, has until now been sponsored by the Strategic Research Institute (SRI), a for-profit group that creates, produces, and manages conferences covering industry specific business-to-business topics.

This year, however, the meeting is being jointly sponsored by SRI and by the Model Agreement Group Initiative (MAGI), a nonprofit group of more than 170 volunteer professionals from various entities involved in clinical research (including several from the DCRI). Formed in the fall of 2003, MAGI’s objective is to develop model agreements that can be used as standards within the industry, thus reducing the complexity, ambiguity, and length of negotiations of clinical research contracts.

Also a first for the conference, MAGI will be administering the new Clinical Research Contract Professional (CRCP) certification examination, which represents the first standardized credential for contracts professionals in the clinical research field.

The conference will also feature speakers who are senior decision-makers from sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), site management organizations (SMOs), investigational sites, and academia. Topics to be discussed include major contract terms and implications; sponsor and site priorities; cost considerations; negotiating skills; negotiating budgets and payment terms; partnering to reduce study costs; model, master, and other ancillary agreements; and managing relationships.