Tata Consultancy Services (TCS),  a leading IT services, business solutions and outsourcing firm and Roche, one of the world's leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, have announced a partnership to advance Roche's Global Capacity Building Initiative (GCBI).

The initiative will provide services to a number of areas in Roche's development organization, including clinical data management, clinical programming, biostatistics and drug safety support. The aim of the collaboration between TCS and Roche is to create a flexible, scalable and high-quality partnership to support the demands of Roche's increasing drug pipeline.

G. L. Telang, Managing Director of Roche India, said, “A local partner in India which has the talents and know-how to support the company in its key initiative.”

The partnership with TCS will help Roche to leverage the extensive talent pool in India, maximize synergies, and gain ongoing cost and process improvements, while maintaining high quality and service levels.

Located in Mumbai, the GCBI programme consists a team of highly qualified pharmacologists, physicians, biostatisticians, pharmacists and informatics specialists. TCS will be working closely with Roche and contribute its strong domain expertise, talent management skills, flexible operating models, transition capabilities and performance-driven processes to the initiative.

J. Rajagopal, Executive Vice President and Global Head -- Life Sciences & Healthcare for TCS said: “The Global Capacity Building Initiative with Roche is another validation of TCS' strategy to focus on services supporting the drug development processes and the investments made in building our domain competencies in this area. The opportunity to work with Roche will further enhance our capabilities and help us build a long-term relationship with an innovation driven company like Roche.”

“TCS continues to develop a knowledge based business, leveraging information technology and the highly talented pool of resources in the life sciences space to fulfill unique resource requirements of companies like Roche,” said V. K. Raman, Head, BPO Services.

Jean-Jacques Garaud, Global Head of Pharma Development at Roche, said, “For Roche, it was key to find the best partner for our GCBI initiative and the collaboration with TCS is the result of an extensive international search. The partnership with TCS will allow us to address the growing operational needs of our development organization and to handle the increasing workload.”

The Life Sciences and Healthcare Practice at TCS has over 3200 professionals including pharmacologists, physicians, biomedical engineers, biostatisticians, ICH/GCP compliance professionals, GxP consultants, PhDs, IT architects, consultants and management graduates who were focused on providing best in class IT consulting, solutions and services to Life Sciences and Healthcare customers across the world.