More than 200 people nearly filled Nelson auditorium Wednesday to hear Tom Pike, CEO of Quintiles, discuss recent trends in the pharmaceutical industry as well as a potential partnership between the company and N.C. State.

Quintiles, a company founded in 1982 by Dennis Gillings, a professor from UNC-Chapel Hill, has 28,000 employees worldwide in over 100 countries.

“We were started by a professor from UNC, who has gone from being a statistics professor to a billionaire,” Pike said.

Currently, Quintiles recruits more students from N.C. State than any other university, according to Pike.

“We have a few projects we are thinking of doing between N.C. State and Quintiles and I think that will be fun for both parties,” Pike said.

Pike began the lecture by discussing some of the recent progress in medicine and present problems.

“Over the last few decades in medicine, we have made a lot of progress,” Pike said. “We have dropped the risk of death followed by a heart attack by 50 to 60 percent.”

Outside the United States, however, many ailments still have high fatality rates, such as in Russia where 750,000 fatalities from cardiovascular disease occurred last year, Pike said. 

“We have 67 trials going associated with reducing cardiovascular disease, just [Quintiles] alone,” Pike said.

Quintiles is a large pharmaceutical company that mainly works to research and develop drugs, and it has helped develop all of the top-50 best-selling drugs currently on the market.

“One of the trends good for our business is that you see more time spent on research and development, and you see more drug development outsourcing to companies like Quintiles,” Pike said. “There are not many growing markets in which you can compete, and this is one of those growing markets.”

Pike also discussed how testing drugs has become increasingly complex over time.

“When I was in college, I had a roommate who made his money by going to clinical trials during the weekend,” Pike said. “What is starting to happen is that now we are starting to get more sophisticated in that we need a much more select group of patients.”

Additionally, testing techniques themselves have become increasingly difficult to conduct over time, according to Pike. 

“You have to get an image of the brain just to see if you are getting progression in treatment for Alzheimer’s,” Pike said. “Procedures associated with clinical trials for drugs are becoming more complex.”

While testing is becoming increasingly difficult, technology has played a big part in helping overcome those challenges, Pike said. 

“We at Quintiles have a Facebook pages for diseases like Lupus, and we connect people together and help them find trials where it makes sense,” Pike said. “Technology is fundamentally changing how we recruit patients.”  

A lot of the research conducted by Quintiles takes place outside the United States due to localized genetics and different diets, Pike said.

“Over 60 percent of our revenues are outside of the United States, and that really represents where the drug development takes place,” Pike said. “Out of our 28,000 employees, only about 9,800 are in the U.S., with a very similar number in Europe and the rest in Asia. It is truly a global phenomenon.”