EXECUTIVE SNAPSHOT

Howard Goldberg

ClinPhone Inc.
Residence: West Windsor
   
Family: Wife, two children
   
Education: Ph.D. from University of the Pacific, and B.S. in biology from SUNY Stony Brook
   
First job: Paper carrier
   
Thumbnail sketch: More than 20 years of experience in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, including more than 15 years with multinational pharmaceutical companies in positions ranging from clinical operations to worldwide strategic planning.
   
What does ClinPhone do? ClinPhone provides technology services to help pharmaceutical companies develop products more efficiently and refocus on the ‘clinical trial’ section of product development. We assist in the clinical development process, specifically in clinical trials themselves. We help collect and manage the data from the trials.
   
How do you do that? We call it a managed service. We host the system, and it’s customized for the needs of a particular clinical trial. It helps to ensure that the patients enrolled properly. It helps to ensure that the supplies of medication are available for patients, because investigational drugs are typically products in very small quantities. And the third thing it does is actually collect data directly from the patient based on their experiences.
   
So pharmaceutical companies outsource part of their product development to you? Yes. By providing the service, we make their jobs a lot easier. A lot of this would’ve been done manually by them or on spreadsheets or on paper with all the built-in errors and inefficiencies.
   
What’s your role personally? At this point, I’m in the management role. I started the U.S. business about 6½ years ago. We had been in the U.K. for about 4 or 5 years, and the founders decided to expand to the States, and that’s where most of the business opportunities were. This is the pharmaceutical capital of the world. So I was brought on to establish the office and initially to do sales and marketing for the most part, to get the name out there, to tell people what we did. And then about a year later, we brought on our first project managers to work directly with clients on projects, and we grew.
   
So six years ago you were a one-man operation. How many people work for the company now? Globally, 450. In the United States, 145 — 95 in Princeton.
   
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your current role so far? Initially, it was educating the marketplace about what we do and how we can help them and then, interestingly enough, for a while it was managing demand — making sure we provide a quality service and that we didn’t just accept every piece of business and be so overwhelmed that we couldn’t handle it. Managing that was a challenge for awhile. The recent challenge has been, because we’re so successful, there’s a lot more competition, a lot more companies claiming to do the same or similar things, which happens in every business. So our challenge is to fend that off.
   
What’s next for the company? We actually invest a comparable amount in R&D as our clients do, and pharmaceutical companies put a lot into R&D. We want to look at any type of information they collect in a clinical trial and sort of streamline the process of collecting that and putting it all in one place where it’s easiest to get at.