Pittsburgh is exceptionally fortunate to have a new German-owned company taking up residence on the city’s South Side. SCOPE International launched its operations here in October 2015 to meet client needs in the United States. Mr. Gerald Meub, the company’s CEO, came to town to mark the occasion and to officially name Ms. Alethea Wieland to lead the company’s activities here.
SCOPE International is an independent, global, full-service contract research organization (CRO) headquartered in Mannheim, Germany. The firm supports clinical trials and regulatory submissions for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies worldwide. SCOPE offers comprehensive clinical development services, including project management, clinical monitoring, data management, biostatistics, and medical writing for a single trial or an entire clinical trials program.
Ms. Wieland is an entrepreneurial expert with extensive experience with clinical research operations, quality control and audits, regulatory submissions, and negotiations with the FDA and Health Canada. She knows first-hand Pittsburgh’s emerging life science sector with impressive drug, biologic, and medical device innovations and spin-outs from the universities that draw outside investments. Although some pockets within industry have taken notice, Pittsburgh is not well known outside of the US. Ms. Wieland firmly believes that Pittsburgh has “economic advantages over Boston, Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia, and other more expensive cities because of the significant savings that can be passed on to our clients from our competitive housing market, cost of living, salary requirements, and highly educated workforce.”
Christian Manders, COO of Promethean LifeSciences, Inc., which is based in Pittsburgh, said, “(our city) is one of the few regions in the world that has over a billion dollars in basic science research and top tier computer science talent (but) Pittsburgh has been underperforming on the commercialization of its research and SCOPE should be able to help the region take the next steps to prove and commercialize concepts.”
SCOPE’s U.S. office opens with multiple customer projects already underway with more slated for 2016. We wish the company well. It brings world-class capability in its field to the region and it recognizes that Pittsburgh is a very promising place to start its U.S. operations.
