Infectious Diseases

ICON’s extensive Infectious Disease expertise enables us to consistently select the best sites, expedite start-up timelines, and achieve enrolment targets for our clients. We apply proven strategies to clinical trials that minimise risk and generate high-quality, reliable data reducing the time and cost of bringing new therapies to market.

Infectious Diseases capabilities

ICON’s Infectious Disease team understands the urgency, complexities, and potential challenges associated with infectious diseases. The majority of our experienced Project Management and Clinical Operations team have experience in ID clinical research, and we’ve conducted studies across a wide range of indications in vaccines, antibacterials, antivirals, antifungals, pneumonia, and antiparasitics. We have treated hospitalised patients with respiratory infections including COVID-19, severe influenza and pneumonia. This presents a great opportunity for ICON to make data-driven recommendations and apply best practices to execute your studies while safeguarding patients. By selecting ICON as your contract research organisation (CRO) partner, you will benefit from:

• Leadership team focused specifically in Infectious Diseases with well over 200 years of combined experience in infectious diseases clinical development, who provide insight into your protocol and strategies to operationalise execution.
• Experience with 129 infectious disease treatment studies within the past five years alone, including over 100 ongoing COVID-19 treatment studies and over 100 antiviral studies for Hepatitis C, HIV, and Hepatitis B. Our antibacterial expertise includes bacterial infection, intra-abdominal, skin/soft tissue infection, and urinary infection.
• Over 40 studies conducted within the past 5 years investigating infectious disease treatments in hospitalised patients.
• Our global COVID-19 team, including medical and drug development experts, is scalable and ready to be deployed.
• Best practices and learnings from our ongoing COVID-19 treatment studies.
• Global Site Network (GSN) and Patient Solutions comprised of ICON’s proprietary and vaccine-experienced health care alliance (HCA) sites that are prepared to conduct COVID-19 treatment trials.
• Through FIRECREST digital solutions our learning and digital experts have considerable experience in developing engaging study focused content. 

Data-driven approach

Our analytical informatics tools supplement our therapeutic expertise and practical experience with data derived from the lab, pharmacy, EMR, diagnostic, and other databases. We provide data related to natural disease histories, study protocol optimisation, and contextual informatics for site selection or enrichment of site-specific populations. We also gather real-time survey data to identify suitable regions and appropriate sites and patient populations, combining existing available data, like investigator metrics and study performance, with direct investigator feedback to minimise study start-up time. Our access to US claims data enables us to identify optimal investigator locations and patient volume.

Excellence in Microbiology (EIM) Committee

World Class team of experts with extensive microbiology experience that collaborate with scientists to ensure the most appropriate protocol design and best in class analytical methods.  The committee also partners to ensure quality, timely and accurate results reporting.

​Government sponsored & funded studies

For over 25 years, ICON has managed basic, applied, and clinical research operations for studies both sponsored, and funded by Government and Public Health bodies, including the United States (US) Government including the U.S. military, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as commercial customers and academic institutions receiving federal research funding. We have supported basic, applied, and clinical infectious disease biomedical research efforts and several hundred clinical trials with over 7,000 subjects – many in the areas of vaccines, antivirals, antibiotics, and other treatments for infectious diseases. We provide concept identification, bench testing, biosafety Level- (BSL-) 3/4 testing, product manufacturing support, and clinical trials for bacterial, viral, parasitic, and emerging diseases.

​Central Laboratories

ICON’s clinical research and laboratory services offer the optimal trial experience for clients and investigative sites by using an integrated approach to Infectious Disease study execution:

• Lab team members are fully integrated into study teams
• Culture, identification and susceptibility
• Customised minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC)
• Testing all specimen types & Isolates
• Semi-quantitative and quantitative cultures
• Species level identification
• Anaerobic chambers for culture and susceptibility tests
• Long-term storage
• Custom assay transfer & validation