Selcia’s position as an international contract research provider to the life sciences industry is built on the experience, creativity and insights of its scientific team. Around 90 per cent of our full-time members of staff are industrial chemists and biologists – nearly two-thirds of whom hold PhDs and post PhD qualifications. With careers in some cases stretching back nearly 30 years, many of our senior scientists are recognised by their peers as world authorities in their fields of interest. The outstanding scientific credentials of our staff are reflected by the near 300 patents filed by current members of our team and its authorship /co-authorship of more than 450 published scientific papers.
However, what really sets Selcia apart as a CRO is the scope and diversity of our scientists’ industrial R+D experience. Many of our senior researchers have joined from “big pharma” and bring with them a wealth of commercial life sciences expertise. With this rich level of knowledge, our team has built a reputation for delivering creative solutions to challenging customer assignments across all major therapeutic areas.
We also recognise the importance of nurturing and encouraging new ideas and enthusiasm. Alongside the appointment of senior R+D practitioners, we recruit talented PhD and post doctoral scientists from leading academic institutions in the UK and overseas.
Our ability to establish and maintain long term relationships with customers is driven by a clear ethical approach to business and a set of corporate values that have been refined over many years. We recognise that confidentiality is a critical issue for all of our customers and have developed processes and systems that ensure that access to customer information remains fully protected. We never disclose project details and customer names in the public domain unless we have full approval from our customers.
At programme start up, if appropriate, we will establish a joint steering group comprising customer and Selcia project team scientists. We have found that this collaborative approach ensures that governance, strategic direction, project milestones and objectives, along with contractual and budgetary matters, are dealt with efficiently in an open and honest manner. Throughout every stage of a customer project we also establish controls that allow for clear measurement, assessment and evaluation. Importantly, we believe in keeping customers fully informed on all issues concerning their project and can tailor our reports and level of scientist-to-scientist communication to meet individual needs.
We maintain a highly flexible approach to customer collaborations – and build bespoke projects based predominantly around Full Time Equivalent (FTE) and Fee for Service (FFS) working arrangements.
Our FTE based collaborations usually operate to an agreed fixed rate with pre-agreed clinical stage milestones and royalties - both of which will be determined by the level of Selcia’s intellectual input into the programme. Depending on the level of shared risk, we can offer a range of flexible approaches: for instance, reduced FTE rates and enhanced reward payments triggered by the successful completion of project milestones. Generally, we have found the FTE approach to be most cost-effective for large drug discovery collaborations.
Meanwhile, FFS collaborations are often the preferred route for smaller projects where Selcia’s intellectual input is less and risk sharing may not be an option. Because FFS projects, by their nature, are more defined and less flexible than FTE relationships, they generally needn’t involve downstream milestone and royalty payments.