When you reach into the medicine cabinet for your Lipitor or Coumaden or Wellbutrin, or the thousands of other drugs that Americans rely on to keep them going, it probably doesn’t occur to you the vast amounts of data and paperwork required to bring a drug to market.

Yet it’s something Keith Parent, the CEO and private owner of Court Square Group (formerly Court Square Data Group), thinks about every day. His company helps biotech firms manage, track, and store the vast amounts of data involved in getting drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

According to Parent, demand for his company’s services is growing. Over the last four years, Court Square has gone from a company that ran server farms for large businesses to one that handles a range of technology requirements mainly for biotechs and pharmaceuticals.

And he wants to keep that momentum going.

Growth by Acquisition

Despite the recent economic downturn, Parent’s plans to expand his business — which recorded in $11 million in revenue last year — remain ambitious. He wants to triple, even quadruple, earnings over the next five years.

As part of that grand plan, Court Square recently acquired the five-person computer systems validation unit of QA Edge in Pennsylvania. Parent is tight-lipped on how much he paid for the division, but said he hopes to secure investor capital for the future acquisitions needed to grow his business by leaps and bounds.

Indeed, Parent envisions a day in the not-too-distant future when Court Square has offices in biotech hubs all along the East Coast in states such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida. Biotech firms tend to sprout up near colleges and research institutes, and those are the places Court Square is headed.

At the moment, Court Square handles most of its work out of its Springfield headquarters. The company, which has satellite offices in Marlborough and Groton, Conn., employs 75 workers. Yet even the Springfield office is poised to expand. When BusinessWest visited, Parent pointed out a swath of empty space reserved for future employees.

Parent, a self-confessed “software guy” who earned his degree in Computer Science in 1983,” launched Court Square out of his home in 1995. His first client was Pfizer Corp., a global pharmaceutical giant. He started off doing software programming for the company, but as projects grew in size and scope, so did Court Square’s repertoire.

“We were managing 3,000 to 4,000 machines a day around the world out of our Groton and Springfield offices, so we learned how to handle large-scale computing in a world-class environment,” said Parent.

Soon Court Square was offering IT services ranging from combining data and systems during mergers and acquisitions to setting up network security systems to designing Microsoft SharePoint portals used for workflow management and collaboration.

Eventually Parent saw the liability in having one large client, so Court Square began aggressively pursuing new business. Today, in addition to Pfizer, which still brings in a lot of business, Court Square serves 21 other life-science clients, including Hewlett-Packard, Genzyme, Biogen, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Harvard Clinical Research Institute, and Tufts Medical Center.

It’s easy to understand why Court Square tapped into drugs. Bringing a drug to market is a huge venture that can cost $900 million and take 12 to 15 years. During that time, a drug goes through a series of three clinical trials to test its safety and efficacy before it can be submitted for FDA approval. The entire process is subject to intense regulatory requirements and involves the managements of massive amounts of data.

What’s more, noted Parent, “each aspect of the drug development life cycle has its own computer system. When you get to clinical trials, there’s clinical trial-management systems (CTMS), adverse event-monitoring systems, and electronic data capture, to name a few.” Court Square helps firms install these systems and manage underlying data.

In recent years, drug development has gotten even more technology-intensive. “Nobody wants another Vioxx scare,” said Parent, referring to the arthritis drug recalled in 2004 after its association with heart attacks. Drug maker Merck & Co. was accused of not doing enough to monitor the drug’s adverse effects in clinical testing.

The result has been more data collection, with many companies now including a fourth phase of clinical testing. “What’s more, everything now is done digitally,” said Parent, who can remember back to the day when his company had to load boxes and boxes of paper into a tractor trailer to ship to the FDA. Today, the FDA requires digital submissions.

Court Square has become so successful in its drug-development focus that it officially dropped the ‘Data’ from it’s name a year ago. At the same time, it introduced a new, stylized logo with a red paper airplane taking off with a swoosh from the red-letter word ‘Group.’’

According to Parent, the company still manages server farms, but wants to be associated more with strategic consulting and an in-depth knowledge of the drug-development lifecycle.

Following the Script

In addition to its recent acquisition, Court Square is in the midst of two other important projects Parent was anxious to share with BusinessWest.

Last year, the company teamed up with three other consulting firms to create the Clinical Research Consortium of Massachusetts (CRCM), a group of Bay State-based research-industry companies offering itself as a multi-pronged consultant group to foreign governments who want a bigger piece of the clinical-research business in Europe. The consortium’s first work is in the Lombardia region of Italy.

“We went to Milan and met with the minister of health and a number of clinical research organizations and put together a five-year plan that’s in front of them right now,” said Parent. “If they take it, we’ll have a great project in front of us that includes strategic consulting at first and eventually technical integration work.”

Court Square is also working with Tufts Medical Center to build a SharePoint portal for researchers. “This site brings together researchers from Tufts, Boston University, and Harvard,” said Parent, adding that 38 such collaboration sites exist nationally, and the ultimate plan is to create one common site that links together researchers from top biotech think-tanks across the country.

“I want scientists to concentrate on science,” Parent said. “And I want the systems they run to enable them to get their job done.”