ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — ProQuest has acquired U.K.-based Pi2 Solutions, an industry leader in product literature databases, workflow tools and related outsourcing services for global pharmaceutical companies. The company plans to align Pi2 with its ProQuest Dialog corporate information service to create an integrated solution for pharmacovigilance and expand ProQuest’s presence in the pharmaceutical industry.

“Bringing together the market-leading tools of ProQuest Dialog and Pi2 creates a compelling new way to streamline the critical drug safety workflow of our pharmaceutical customers,” said Tim Wahlberg, ProQuest senior vice-president and General Manager, ProQuest Dialog. “ProQuest Dialog and Pi2 have an existing partnership and common customers, who have expressed interest in tighter integration between these tools. This is a great example of ProQuest’s ongoing effort to develop solutions that combine content, software tools and services in one place.”

Currently, pharmaceutical companies rely on ProQuest Dialog to monitor scientific literature for advances and news on drugs and therapies through alerts. They can then use Pi2’s Drug Safety Triager and related services to automate the review, categorization, and indexing of alert results. These results then flow into Pi2’s PinPoint product — a customized repository that offers market-leading search and content management functionality and delivers necessary regulatory reports.

The combination of ProQuest Dialog and Pi2 will significantly improve and simplify drug safety workflows in the industry. However, many pharmaceutical firms have developed very customized solutions, so ProQuest Dialog will continue to feed alerts to other providers of product literature databases and Pi2 will continue to ingest alerts from other aggregators. ProQuest will maintain partnerships and connectivity with all the content and software providers that its customers use to support their processes.

The Pi2 co-founders Mark Drinkwater and Nigel Johnson will remain deeply involved with the business. Mr. Drinkwater joins ProQuest as Director of Pi2 and will report to Mr. Wahlberg. Mr. Johnson will continue to work with ProQuest in a consulting capacity over the coming year to ensure a smooth transition. Mr. Drinkwater and the rest of the U.K.-based Pi2 team will move to ProQuest’s London office, while Pi2’s U.S. employees will continue in their current locations.

About Pi2 Solutions Ltd
London-based Pi2 Solutions Ltd is a privately owned company specializing in Product Literature Database (PLD) systems for the biopharmaceutical industry and innovative workflow applications for key user groups in functions such as Medical Affairs, Marketing, Drug Safety and Publications Planning.

Established in 2002, Pi2’s global biopharmaceutical clients encompass the very largest pharmaceutical companies as well as small, emerging biotechs. The strategic aim of Pi2 is to develop novel solutions to workflow challenges of users of drug-related literature in knowledge centers and in business critical roles that rely heavily on efficient information handling.

About ProQuest and Dialog
Dialog pioneered online searching in advance of the Internet. As the global leader in providing mission-critical information that drives innovation by professionals of all kinds including scientists, engineers, legal practitioners and business analysts, Dialog is renowned for enabling precision search of content from the world’s most authoritative publishers. Sources include massive deep web repositories of scientific, technical and biomedical literature, patents, and thousands of industry, news and company information sources — now being made accessible through the powerful and intuitive ProQuest Dialog^™ search service.

Professional searchers such as librarians, researchers and information users from corporate, professional and government organizations in more than 100 countries prize Dialog for depth of content, advanced searching and the ability to provide complete solutions.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.

The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest, Bowker, Dialog, ebrary and EBL businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon discovery service, the ProQuest Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

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SOURCE ProQuest