Cytel Software, a leading provider of software and services for optimized clinical trial design and analysis  has completed a round of financing led by Merck Capital Ventures, LLC. This financing will be used to fund additional growth both in the U.S. and abroad to offer broader clinical trial solutions to the biopharmaceutical industry.  
 
“Cytel has a strong reputation for developing outstanding software tools and services for the biopharmaceutical and devices industries,” said Ranganath Nayak, CEO. “This new investment by Merck Capital Ventures provides a solid foundation for growing a world-class company.  I am also very pleased to have Per Lofberg join our Board.  His experience and stature in the industry as well as his pragmatism will be of great value to us.”

“The pharmaceutical industry understands well the importance of improving clinical trial productivity, and actively seeks practical solutions,” said Per Lofberg, President and CEO of Merck Capital Ventures. “Cytel’s industry-leading East® software suite for the design and monitoring of clinical trials, coupled with its widely adopted statistical analysis tools and its thought leadership put the company in a good position to do well in this large and growing market.”

Randomized clinical trials are an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. The ability to stop such trials early for benefit, equivalence or futility, or to re-design them so that they are not inconclusive, has enormous ethical and economic value. East® software was the first commercial software package developed that could aid statisticians in these decisions. Based on well-established statistical principles of group sequential inference, East software makes it possible to design and monitor such studies without compromising their type-1 error or power. Cytel has plans to release a number of additional analytic software products for the design, monitoring, and operation of flexible clinical trials. The company also provides consulting services associated with the design and monitoring of flexible trials.

About Cytel Software Corporation
Cytel Software Corporation has a 17-year track record as the premier provider of software and services for the design and analysis of clinical trials. Cytel Software’s Pharma Division provides software, training and consulting to clinical trial sponsors seeking to run their trials more efficiently. Cytel’s East software is used by every division of the FDA and by hundreds of biostatisticians and clinicians in industry and academia to design, simulate and monitor group sequential and adaptive flexible clinical trials. More than 10,000 customers also use Cytel’s award-winning StatXact® and LogXact® software for exact statistical inference. Cytel Software is a privately owned company, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with software development operations in Pune, India. For more information visit www.cytel.com.

About Merck Capital Ventures
Merck Capital Ventures (MCV) is a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. MCV seeks to invest capital in emerging businesses in areas related to the commercialization, distribution and delivery of pharmaceuticals and related health care services. The focus of MCV is to invest in technologies that accelerate innovation related to the pharmaceutical business and other sectors of health care delivery.

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