Akaza Research has announced  that over 1000 copies of OpenClinica, an Open Source Clinical trial software platform, have been downloaded since OpenClinica was made available in October 2005. This represents a milestone for Open Source software in the clinical trial arena. This number of downloads affirms Akaza’s belief in the pent up demand for a low cost solution to the problem of staging and managing clinical trials.

Proprietary competitive platforms cost in the 100’s of thousands of dollars, which, with exorbitant recurring costs quickly become prohibitively expensive for small academic or commercial clinical trials. Akaza Research is committed to developing affordable and extensible informatics products and services, which serve the needs of academic and non-profit institutions as well as commercial entities engaged in clinical, healthcare and biomedical research.

Akaza believes in using internally and community-developed open source software and open standards to provide professional services and consulting. These open solutions enable Akaza’s clients and partners to effectively address the complex challenges of data management, compliance, and interoperability in the modern clinical research and healthcare environment.

The OpenClinica platform was developed using the Java J2EE framework, with a database abstraction layer interoperable with PostgreSQL 8.x (porting to DB2 and SQL Server databases planned in forthcoming releases). OpenClinica runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3.x, on top of any Servlet/JSP container that implements the Servlet 2.x and JavaServer Pages 2.x specifications from the Java Community Process. It was developed to run on Apache Jakarta Tomcat 5.x. This architecture provides a secure, robust and extensible system for managing multiple clinical research studies within a centralized repository.