Ensuring the confidentiality of clinical discoveries and patent applications with Ideals

Staying on the frontline for the next breakthroughs in clinical development

Starting as a small biotech company in Taiwan, SyneuRx positioned itself at the forefront of developing new drugs for neuropsychiatric conditions and eventually expanded internationally.

Over the years, the company rapidly evolved into a successful global company with many stakeholders, conducting clinical trials of new classes of drugs for Covid-19 and diseases of the central nervous system.

With each new endeavor, the company relies on an Ideals virtual data room to securely improve communication with multiple investors in different countries while maintaining complete control over their highly sensitive data.

The context

Founded in 2013, SyneuRx is a clinical-stage global biotech company registered in Taiwan. Over the years the company became a successful life science company looking to expand its business internationally.

According to Vivian Wu, CSO of SyneuRx, “We went public in 2016 on the Emerging Stock Board of Taiwan, but as the company continued to grow, we wanted to expand outside the territory to reach a bigger market.” In a bold move, the company decided to set up a subsidiary in the USA.

They succeeded in setting up a U.S. operation, all unsuspecting that Covid-19 would take the company in a completely new direction a few years later.

Pharmaceutical companies around the world were looking for ways to provide advanced tools for fighting the pandemic, and SyneuRx was no exception.

“We were lucky to find that one compound in our library of potential chemicals showed promise. It was quite potent in the early studies, so we were able to quickly advance to Phase 2 clinical trial in the U.S., and the results will be available by the end of June 2022,” Vivian Wu concluded.

Key challenges

As a biotech company, SyneuRx has highly confidential information they need to securely share in different jurisdictions. “We have a lot of confidential files: our own discoveries, regulatory information, patent files. So, we are very careful about our IP,” commented Vivian.

Their key requirements to optimize communication with current and potential investors/collaborators in Taiwan and abroad were:

• Securely store confidential information such as new discoveries and patent applications
• Retain absolute control of all files and multiple users’ activity
• Add hundreds of users with as many as possible different permissions
• Revoke data even after different investors had downloaded it

Vivian Wu explained that the business demanded the best tool available, consequently the company had done extensive research before settling on Ideals. “Security was our number one priority, and Ideals had a very good SOP, with multiple redundancy backups.”

Moreover, “things were really self-explanatory for me. It was so easy to upload, download, add users, allow different permissions. It was very intuitive, the way the functions are organized, the display.”

Solution

To support their strategy, they contracted two financial advisers, and as part of that venture, these advisers were reaching out to potentially interested parties in China, the U.S., and Europe, sharing extremely confidential information across different borders with no time lag via the cloud-based platform.

With so many projects being hosted in the virtual data room, it was getting more and more complicated to communicate and share data with so many stakeholders.

The SineuRx team smartly found a way to keep the same confidential information available to different people, while having complete control of the access levels for multiple users, “initially, we just created a data room for each, and it was easy to copy data over and edit files there. But then we found we could just have one data room and create different user groups and assign privileges from there.”

The team was especially impressed by the facility to retain control over any files downloaded to local storage or shared with unknown parties, “everything was tracked, and I was able to narrow down the IP and could erase the encrypted PDF. It had everything we wanted.”  concluded Vivian.

With Ideals as their virtual data room provider, SyneuRx was able to efficiently:

• Open many projects with hundreds of users according to their needs
• Track all the activity with complete confidence that the security protocols would safeguard their extremely confidential files
• Create separate data rooms for particular clients or one data room with different user groups having different access levels
• Keep the Q&A sessions organized to handle ongoing queries from their investors
• Control the access levels and document permissions for different stakeholders

The future

After having used Ideals features to stay in close contact with their investors and deal efficiently with any questions that might arise, SineuRX continues to use the virtual data room as it “has all that I need and none of what I don’t need,” affirmed Vivian.

They still hope to open yet more projects in the data room in the near future, “we have ongoing trials and trials concluding soon, so we expect to need to use the data room even more for collaboration with our current and future partners!” she concluded.