CATO SMS Acquires Nuventra in order to Expand its Drug Development Offering Into Clinical Pharmacology

CATO SMS, a global provider of regulatory and clinical research services, announced today the acquisition of Nuventra, Inc., to expand its offering into the critical area of clinical pharmacology. Nuventra, headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, is a leading company in clinical pharmacology science and services. The acquisition expands CATO SMS's portfolio of specialized solutions that help biopharmaceutical companies with drug development by providing a key set of skills targeted at significantly reducing development risk, costs, and timelines.

CATO SMS now provides customers cutting-edge clinical pharmacology services such as strategic consulting, pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD), pharmacometrics (population PK), and biosimulation. Nuventra is well-known for its track record of transforming complex data into meaningful insights for over 650 biopharmaceutical companies across a wide range of therapeutic areas. Its team of scientific experts and senior consultants use the most advanced mathematical modeling tools in the industry to inform clinical design and predict trial outcomes.

Nuventra's range of solutions include:

• pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PK/PD), which describes the movement of drugs through the body from absorption to elimination (PK), as well as the body's biological response to drugs (PD) to determine optimal dosing paradigms, safety margins, and efficacy characteristics.

• population pharmacokinetics (popPK and popPK/PD), which studies the variability in drug concentrations among individuals in a group of interest receiving clinically relevant doses of a drug.

• clinical pharmacology strategic consulting, which includes overall and targeted clinical pharmacology strategy in support of marketing applications for drugs and biologics.

• physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK), which incorporates blood flow and tissue composition of organs to predict the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) of drugs.

• quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP), which models the interplay of the drug (dose, dosing regimen, etc.) with target biology, using computational systems to characterize the interaction between drugs, biological systems, and disease processes.

• model-informed drug development (MIDD), which uses modeling techniques to improve the decision-making process in drug development, thereby leading to clinical trial efficiencies and, in some cases, replacing trials altogether.

About Nuventra
Nuventra is the pharmaceutical industry's preferred provider of clinical pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacometrics consulting services. Nuventra provides pharmaceutical companies and contracts research organizations (CROs) with unique access to a hands-on team of industry-leading consultants with extensive experience in complex studies and analyses. By taking complex pharmacokinetic and pharmacometrics concepts and making them understandable and usable for common sense drug development, we embrace the notion that simplicity and clarity lead to smart decisions.

About CATO SMS
CATO SMS is a provider of specialized clinical research solutions formed in 2019 by the merger of Cato Research and SMS-oncology. CATO SMS, with over 30 years of professional experience focusing on the needs of small and emerging biopharmaceutical companies, effectively designs and executes studies from strategy to approval in complex indications and modalities throughout a wide range of therapeutic areas, with a proven center of excellence in oncology. The regulatory, therapeutic, and operational expertise of CATO SMS enables the company to meet and exceed expectations.