CDISC Adds New Board Members to Strengthen Leadership Base.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Dr. David Hardison, Chairman of the Board of CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium, Inc.), is pleased to announce the addition of two Directors to the CDISC Board; Dr. Christopher Chute of the Mayo Clinical College of Medicine and Paula Brown Stafford of Quintiles Transnational Corporation.

The Board will convene for the first time with all new and incumbent members at the Annual CDISC Board meeting on 23-24 April 2007, which precedes the 4th CDISC European Interchange meeting in Montreux, Switzerland. Both of these individuals bring a wealth of relevant experience to the CDISC Board of Directors from their respective roles as Professor and Chair for the Biomedical Informatics Department at the Mayo Clinical College of Medicine, and as Executive Vice President of Global Data Management at Quintiles.

Paula Brown Stafford brings a global perspective and broad experience from her varied roles within a large contract research organization. Her current role, heading the globalization of the Quintiles Data Management function, a project where she is leading a team that is 1,200 people strong, representing an investment of more than $100m in revenue, exemplifies her multifaceted experience. "Paula's expertise and perspective will be most valuable at this critical point in CDISC's growth and adoption," states Rebecca Kush, President of CDISC. Paula adds, "To date, Quintiles has delivered nearly 200 CDISC-compliant databases on behalf of Pharma. My belief is that the key to the industry's future is to deliver a CDISC-compliant data structure before the first patient enters a trial. Again, the FDA supports this view and believes that CDISC is the natural leader to make this happen. I am keenly interested in bringing my expertise to the CDISC table and to help lead the vision for the pharmaceutical industry." Stafford has accepted the position of Chair of the Board's Financial Oversight Committee. She will serve out the term of a prior Board member through 2007.

Dr. Chute is well known and respected in his field. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications regarding standards work in the specific areas of vocabulary and health concept representation in Health Informatics. In addition to his leadership role at the Mayo Clinical College of Medicine, Dr. Chute has chaired numerous efforts in this regard such as the Joint HL7 and SNOMED Meeting: The Boundary between Vocabulary and Information Models, NASA Vocabulary Summit (2004); ANSI Health Informatics Standards Board (HISB) (2004-2005); NIH Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics: Special Emphasis Panel (2005). Dr. Chute is currently the Chair of the US Delegation to the ISO Informatics Technical Committee (TC215) (2007-2009). "CDISC will most certainly benefit from Dr. Chute's invaluable expertise in the areas of terminology, information technology and standards development," stated Rebecca Kush, President of CDISC. Dr. Chute commented, "I am honored and delighted to join an organization which has shown strong leadership in the clinical trials standards community and commitment to work constructively with related standards organizations in harmonizing information models and messages. As a representative of the clinical community, these goals are laudable and practical." Dr. Chute will serve on the Board from 2007 through 2009.

The CDISC Board has a total of ten Directors. Two others were re-elected to serve a second three-year term for 2007-2009. We welcome back Dr. Pierre-Yves Lastic, Senior Director, Standards Management and Data Privacy at Sanofi-Aventis, and William Rosen, Executive Director, External Affairs, Standards and Support with Pfizer. Dr. Lastic was elected by the CDISC Industry Advisory Board. Dr. Hardison stated, "CDISC is very fortunate to have such an esteemed Board of Directors. Each Director on the Board has unique talents that will direct the mission of CDISC to fruition."

ABOUT CDISC

CDISC is a global, open, multidisciplinary, non-profit organization that has established standards to support the acquisition, exchange, submission and archive of clinical research data and metadata. The CDISC mission is to develop and support global, platform-independent data standards that enable information system interoperability to improve medical research and related areas of healthcare. CDISC standards are vendor-neutral, platform-independent and freely available via the CDISC website.

CDISC is made possible through the generous support of its members, sponsors, and volunteer participants. These include academia, biopharmaceutical companies, technology and service providers, institutional review boards and anyone interested in streamlining biopharmaceutical product development and improving clinical data quality and healthcare. CDISC also has joint memberships with HL7, HIMSS, AMIA and the C-PATH Institute.

Additional information on CDISC can be found on the CDISC website at www.cdisc.org.