European drug regulator aims to sharpen software delivery

European Medicine Agency seeks software development partners

Pharmaceutical watchdog the European Medicine Agency is looking to outsource support for its application development in a deal potentially worth up to €32m (£28m).

A notice placed in the Official Journal of the European Union confirmed that the EMA needed support to improve its ability “to specify and acquire services and artefacts” provided by third parties via its online transaction processing system.

Previously, EMA, which is responsible for licensing medicines in Europe, had rolled out CAST’s Application Intelligence Platform software to ensure the efficacy of software it developed in-house.

It currently spends up to €20m a year on in-house and outsourced software development, and has used CAST to measure the return in gets on that investment.

EMA’s IT department maintains around 100 different information systems storing around 70 terabytes of data.