[East Greenwich-based] Analytical Edge, Inc., today announced that it has partnered with Brown University and received funding from the Slater Technology Fund to develop and commercialize a revolutionary statistical methodology that has the potential to dramatically reduce the time and costs of performing clinical trials for new drugs and medical devices.

The pharmaceutical industry spends over $10 billion annually on clinical trials, which now account for more than half the total cost of developing a new drug or medical device. Factors driving up the cost include a greater emphasis on developing treatments for chronic and degenerative diseases; rising subject recruitment costs; and the ever increasing size and complexity of clinical trials.

Analytical Edge uses a more flexible, efficient and accurate statistical approach to design clinical trials and analyze their results. The approach is based on a methodology referred to as Pure Likelihood, a new technique for measuring the strength of statistical evidence in data, which presents significant advantages for both standard and adaptive clinical trial designs.