Arbortext Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to focus on the life sciences industry, offering both new capabilities and new applications.
P.G. Bartlett, vice president of marketing at Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Arbortext, said the initiative will enable pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and biotechnology companies to bring new and revised products to market faster and cheaper while complying with complex regulatory requirements and other issues.
Bartlett said the new applications are a combination of Arbortext core products, partner integration and consulting services. Arbortexts Epic software provides the cornerstone of the initiative to help users create, manage and publish complex business and technical documents, such as new drug applications, product information (package inserts, leaflets and labels), and written documentation of procedures that support the methods, facilities and controls used in the preparation, and processing and packaging of pharmaceutical and medical products.
Some new features include change tracking, enhanced API including support for Active-X, stronger integration with Documentum Inc.s content management system, and digital signatures and watermarks.
Arbortexts XML-based technology and initiative provides support for pharmaceutical manufacturing, including maintaining regulatory compliance, pharmaceutical package inserts and labels, and regulatory submissions.
“Arbortext has long been a pioneer in XML authoring and publishing software,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, in Cambridge, Mass. “Arbortext has shown that it is able to offer focused software to support every aspect of the drug development lifecycle—from discovery, clinical trials and regulatory approvals to manufacturing, marketing and medical affairs.”
Arbortexts life sciences customers include Abbott Laboratories, American Medical Association, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Canadian Pharmacists Association, GE Medical Systems, Guidant CPI, GlaxoSmithKline, Kimberly Clark, Merck, MicroMedics and Pfizer.
Arbortext also announced an agreement with X-Hive Corp., in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to jointly develop and market an integration between X-Hives native XML database, X-Hive/DB, and Arbortexts Epic XML editing and publishing software.
And Arbortext also recently announced its plans to support Documentum 5, the next-generation ECM (enterprise content management) system from Pleasanton, Calif.-based Documentum.
“By integrating our Epic software with the Documentum 5 ECM platform, organizations will have the advantage of everything an XML-based situation has to offer: a standards-based approach to gathering, creating, transforming, delivering and archiving information” to a variety of media format, Arbortexts Bartlett said.