Staff Photo by Dan Henry / The Chattanooga Times Free Press- 1/26/17. Richard A Krause, Medical Director of ClinSearch, speaks about his Chattanooga company and the work they do to test upcoming drugs for effectiveness and also side effects in area volunteers. Company at a glance
Name: ClinSearchLocation: 6035 Shallowford RoadOwner: Wake Research Associates, L.L.C.Founder: Dr. Richard Krause, a retired gastroenterologistStarted: 1996Staff: 11 employeesServices: The company tests new drugs and medical applications on volunteer patients for pharmaceutical companiesBringing drugs to marketThe path a drug travels from the lab to your medicine cabinet usually takes years and involves three phases. ClinSearch helps conduct work on three of the four trial phases:Phase 1 – Usually involves 20 to 80 volunteers, watched overnight to determine what the drug’s most frequent side effects are and, often, how the drug is metabolized and excreted.Phase 2: Usually involves a few dozen to about 300 volunteers to obtain preliminary data on whether the drug works in people who have a certain disease or condition. For controlled trials, patients receiving the drug are compared with similar patients receiving only a placebo or a different drug.Phase 3 – Involves up to 3,000 volunteers to evaluate the drugs effectiveness at different doses and with different drugs among differing populations.
At age 70, Richard Krause is still on the cutting edge of new medical treatments.
Dr. Krause retired from his own medical practice more than a decade ago, but the drug trial and testing business he started in 1996 – ClinSearch – has grown into Chattanooga’s biggest clinical drug trial business.
Krause has been a medical pioneer of sorts in Chattanooga since he came to town in 1977 as one of the city’s first gastroenterologists after serving internships and working at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and University of Massachusetts in Worster, Massachusetts. Dr. Krause helped open GI labs at both Memorial and Parkridge hospitals and went on to help bring the first ERCP (Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography) and papillotomy to town. He later opened one of the region’s first physician-owned endoscopy labs.
ClinSearch conducts its clinical trials for most major pharmaceutical manufacturers and advertises regularly on radio and television and in the newspaper to recruit volunteers with particular ailments or diseases to help test out new drugs. The volunteers don’t know if they are getting the real drug or a placebo, but they are monitored closely during the trial to assess their health and any impact from the new drugs. ClinSearch patients are paid for their travel and expenses, along with a small stipend.