Company History

In 1997, while serving as Chief Medical Officer at Eli Lilly and Company, Dr. Alfonso J. Alanis recognized an industry-wide issue: the lack of enrollment of ethnic minorities in clinical trials.

The issue was not an isolated phenomenon or a problem restricted to large pharmaceutical companies only, but it was widespread and involved large and small pharma, biotechnology, and medical device companies and even academic institutions doing clinical research.

In studying the root-causes of this phenomenon, it became clear that these were numerous and complex and that they were different for different ethnic groups. Issues ranging from lack of opportunity due to the presence of barriers to access, to a deep sense of lack of trust in the government, in the health-care community and in clinical investigators. Cultural and language barriers are also evident. However, one common thread in all these cases was that minority physicians, the physicians who for the most part take care of minority patients, were systematically absent from participating in clinical research.

In subsequent years, Dr. Alanis tried to catalyze the creation of minority physician groups that would focus their attention on this issue. He became convinced that improving the representation of minorities in clinical trials was not only "the right thing" to do, but also "the smart thing" to do since it was projected that ethnic minorities would continue to grow from 34% of the general population to 51% in 2050. This effort, unfortunately was not as successful as originally planned.

Finally, in October of 2004, Dr. Alanis invited Mr. Rex Alexander to join him in the formation of Anaclim a new CRO focused on the enrollment of ethnically-balanced populations into clinical trials. Rex was retiring at the end of that year after 33 years of service in clinical development at Lilly.

Anaclim, LLC, was legally constituted in March of 2005, and formally started operations on December 1, 2005.